“Fry the onions until they’re brown, then stir in the walnuts and 2 cups of water. Return the browned meat to the pan and simmer for an hour until the meat is tender. Stir in the pomegranate juice, sugar and lemon juice. Simmer for thirty minutes until the sauce is quite dark. Serve with rice.”
From an Iranian recipe for Fessenjoon.
They say food is the way into a man’s heart. I say it’s the key to a woman’s mind.
Gorging on cookie dough ice cream and Kit-Kats? She is most probably nursing a broken heart.
Stocking the fridge full of duck paté, red wine and strawberries? There is a new romance in the horizon.
Lasagna baking in the oven? She is trying to escape some problems at work or in the family.
Her Aash-e-reshteh so salty it’s inedible? You must have made her angry somehow and she is lashing out. (Or maybe the mother-in-law is visiting, hehe).
Which brings me of course to pomegranates. An extraordinary consumption of pomegranates. Pomegranate seeds sprinkled on top of ice cream, meats marinated in pomegranate sauce, vodka and pomegranate juice as aperitif, and of course that yummy pomegranate and walnut stew known as fessenjoon… All those pomegranates suddenly popping out throughout every course of the day mean, simply, she is happy in love.
I have never gotten to the pomegranates of course. Plenty of lasagna and ice cream though, to get me through my adolescence when the BADMAN (Bastard Asshole Dad of Moji And Nima) left my mother, brother and me with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in debt and no warning.
That was five years ago when I was fifteen and Nima twelve. We had to sell the house in Beverly Hills and move to a one bedroom apartment in the… gulp, yes it’s still hard for me to say it… the… Valley.
Yes, the dreaded V-Word. The armpit of Los Angeles. The Iranian ghetto. The unthinkable for a former Bev Hills princess.
Of course, I had to change schools since I no longer lived in that coveted school district that gives you access to the pearly gates of Bev Hills High. Instead, I had the lovely task of getting acclimated to metal detectors and scary Persian boys hissing at me in the hallways, while trying to duck bullets from Hispanic gang-bangers as I awaited the bus home.
Needless to say, I lost all my Bev Hills “friends” (‘xcept for Amanda) as if my misfortune and poverty were somehow my fault and worse, contagious. I did not bother making any new ones at the new school, or even trying. In fact, I did not bother to do a whole lot of things.
Me, the fashion show coordinator, the co-editor of the yearbook, the champion debater, and the honor roll student, I became…well… a mediocre nobody dragging myself through class after class, pondering the uselessness of it all, since I was not going to afford college anyway.
That’s when I started eating. All the junk food I could get my hands on would go straight in my mouth. Peanuts, Ajeel, Popsicles, chips… I would bake in the 105 degree sun by the common swimming pool of our new digs every afternoon, munching on pretzels and sipping cheap Margarita mix while hairy Armenians would splash into the water with the acrobatic skill of trained seals at Aqua-World if not their gracefulness.
I would close my eyes and think of the hundred and one ways I would beat the BADMAN to a pulp if ever I encountered him. By the time I graduated from high school, I had gained twenty pounds.
My mother finally noticed. Well, she was and is still a basket case. And that was true even before the BADMAN left her. No help at all. She threatened to send me to a fat farm. She started hiding my cookies and peanut butter and I countered by finding creative places to hide my treasures, kind of like an alcoholic who knows where to store the vodka bottles in rehab.
We would get into screaming matches and poor Nima learned to pump up the volume on his Ipod during those times rather than getting involved between two screaming banshees.
Once, she had the nerve to shout at me: “Akheh Mojgan, why couldn’t you become anorexic at least, like all the other depressed girls do?” Yes, that’s my mother in a nutshell. Aw shucks, another food metaphor, I really gotta stop with that.
Finally, she had a brilliant idea. Even my mother sometimes has a moment of genius amidst all the rest of her lunacy. She called my grandma Mahrokh in Paris and within two weeks, we were picking her up at LAX for what was supposed to be a short holiday.
The holiday lasted for the past two years and I am now back to a size 6. I’ll tell you all about it next time…
