Given that we are now officially in spring, the Persian New Year, aka, Nowruz, has also come. At my last company, I made a Persian friend who was on my team, who also loved food. We spent a lot of time talking about food, different cultural traditions, and the first time we met, the two of us were actually charged with preparing food for two days for my team’s offsite at a semi-remote house in Northern California. The more she talked about Persian food, the more I started reading about it and got into it. And so I started experimenting more with Persian dishes like Persian lentils, rice, chicken and fish. I was amazed at how much saffron can be used in Persian cooking, as I’d never really known what to do with saffron before Persian or Indian cooking. I’d bought a number of small bottles of it from Costco, during travels in India, and had been gifted them by Chris’s mom. But given that saffron is actually more expensive by weight than diamonds, I always used it sparingly.

This week, in light of Nowruz, I made Persian sabzi polo, or Persian herbed rice with tahdig, or crispy bottomed rice, as well as slow-cooked salmon with herbs and spices. I had bought a massive amount of cilantro, parsley, dill, and scallions just for these two dishes. And as Chris watched me chop up a bunch of herbs, he looks at all the greens across the kitchen counter and goes, “We can’t eat herbs!” He meant we couldn’t *just* eat herbs for dinner, but because he said that sentence so slowly and didn’t say much after that, he made it sound like herbs were inedible. I reminded him how lucky he is to have such a varied diet with all my creative cooking even when he randomly forgets that yes, herbs actually are edible, to which he responded, “I give you a varied diet by taking you all over the freaking world!” Talk about men who don’t seem to take feedback well…