For 'Top Chef' judge Nilou Motamed, the Iranian herb platter sabzi khordan is a way of life

Ever since the pandemic cooped us up back in March, beautiful, generous flurries of fresh, soft, fragrant herbs have felt like an antidote to everything awful. My kitchen windowsill has become a garden; next to the pots, lemongrass sprouts and flourishes in a vase. When I can make it to my favorite Middle Eastern grocery, I come back with armfuls of dill and tarragon; at the Asian supermarket, I bring back ridiculous volumes of shiso, Thai basil, mint. Because I’ve developed an acute fear of running out, I just installed an LED-powered hydroponic AeroGarden outfitted with dill, spearmint, thyme, parsley and two kinds of basil. 

Toss a handful of fresh herbs on the plainest dish — potato salad, hummus, grilled zucchini — and it instantly becomes gorgeous, alluring, uplifting and even life-affirming. 

Nilou Motamed on the stoop of her brownstone in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn | photo by Peter Jon Lindberg

So why not just eat herbs? That’s the idea behind sabzi khordan, the platter of herbs and accouterments that anchors every Iranian table. “It’s essential to any meal we have, always” says Nilou Motamed. Like just about everyone I know who cooks, the former editor-in-chief of Food & Wine, current “Top Chef” judge, global food and travel guru and co-founder of Story Collective has been planting herbs profusely. 

“Our entire fire escape is an herb garden,” she says, “something we’ve never done before.” 

Nilou also shows up early to line up for herbs from Lani’s Farm at her local farmer’s market in Brooklyn; she describes them as phenomenal. “Our farmers market has gotten really competitive, and she has cilantro I’m trying to sprout, with incredible, deep, almost anise flavor. It has a purple stem.” 

Nilou, who was born in Iran, grew up eating Persian food at home even after she moved with her family to New York when she was 13. Because of that, fresh herbs have always played an outsized, aromatic role in her life. (I’m calling her Nilou because I’ve known her more than 25 years, and referring to her by her last name just feels too weird.)

Herbs from Nilou Motamed’s fire-escape garden | photo by Nilou Motamed

She fondly remembers spending time back in Iran at her father’s family house in an orchard (“bagh” in Farsi) in the town of Hamedan, amid groves of sour cherry, apricot, plum, almond and walnut trees. They’d lay down a Persian carpet outside under a big shade tree and picnic on kababs made from a just-slaughtered lamb. 

“Coming from the mountains, there were these qanat that run through all the countryside — mini mini mini streams — and all these herbs, the mints and watercresses would grow there,” says Nilou. “We’d pick the herbs and put our bottles of Coca-Cola in the ice cold water and drink it with the kabab. There’s something about herbs that makes you feel like you’re connected to your environment.” 

Maybe that’s why herbs are speaking to us so sweetly just now — we need them to connect to the natural world. 

They’re celebrated lushly on the sabzi khordan platter, which generally includes tarragon, dill, parsley, mint, cilantro and reyhan (a family of basils that includes Thai basil), along with scallions, radishes and/or Persian cucumbers, feta cheese, and sometimes walnuts, is there to nibble on throughout any Iranian meal — including kabab, of course.

“On Friday, every family does kabab,” says Nilou. “It’s very basic; we don’t use a ton of spices. It’s beautiful grilled meat, very plain rice, the meat basted in butter and saffron, a great cut char-grilled on aromatic wood, and then with the sabzhi khordan, you can do whatever you want to create the flavors.”

But serve it with freshly baked nan-e barbari (Persian flatbread), and sabzi khordan can also be a meal in itself. 

I know what you’re thinking: Where are we going to get nan-e barbari, especially during a pandemic? 

“I cheat and make it with pizza dough,” says Nilou. “If you use a pizza stone, it’s amazing, and it’s so easy to make.” Five minutes to pull and stretch the dough onto the pizza stone or baking sheet, press in some grooves, brush with a yogurt wash and sprinkle on nigella and/or sesame seeds, then 20 to 25 minutes in the oven and you’ve got barbari.

We tested her recipe using a couple different brands, including Trader Joe’s, and it turned out stunningly well. 

Nan-e Barbari made from store-bought pizza dough. Really!

Once you’re at the table — with your splendid sabzi khordan and your golden, crisp barbari bread — the idea is to create the perfect bite for yourself or a tablemate. There’s even a word for that bite: loghme. “You put some feta cheese in the bread, and then whatever your perfect complement of herbs is — whether you’re a dill or a tarragon person, or you like both, maybe the little tail of a scallion.”

Treat yourself to one sabzi khordan fest, and you may find yourself hooked. The herb habit is truly addictive; if you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself scattering herbs over all kinds of dishes with abandon. Untreated, you may even turn into someone like Nilou, who will “literally buy bushels of herbs, and spend way too much time stemming and freezing. If you dry everything really well, and freeze them in Tupperware containers, they stay fresh. I’m like my own Jolly Green Giant.”

Go ahead. Treat yourself. Live a little. I’m pretty sure that even if the fix is fleeting, it’ll make you feel better.

Would you like a window on Nilou’s Persian cooking adventures? Follow her on Instagram @niloumotamed.

RECIPE: Sabzi Khordan (Persian Herb Platter)

RECIPE: Nan-e Barbari (Persian Flatbread)

Forget the queso: Time to move beyond Tex-Mex and explore the joys of Texas Mexican comida casera

Nostalgia, as a story last week in The New York Times explained, can serve as “a kind of emotional pacifier, helping us to become accustomed to a new reality that is jarring, stressful and traumatic.” And so it’s not surprising that, during these incredibly disturbing times, we reach for the kinds of nostalgic foods that soothe us — mac and cheese, pasta with ragù bolognese, spaghetti and meatballs, cheese enchiladas.

But children outgrow their transitional objects, the blankies and bunnies that soothed them as babies. And so I would submit that maybe, just maybe, it’s time for people to give up queso — the gooey comfort dip that, let’s face it, folks, is made from Velveeta.

An attempt to chase down the history of a dish I grew up eating, Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken, led me last week to a very interesting writer, chef and filmmaker, Adán Medrano. Medrano has written and spoken extensively about the roots of Mexican cooking in Texas, which, to be sure, did not involve process cheese (the actual industry term).

Adán Medrano at a cooking demo in Moscow in 2019 | photo courtesy of Adán Medrano

In 2014, Medrano, a San Antonio native who was the founder of the San Antonio CineFestival (the first and longest-running Latinx film festival in the U.S.) and now lives in Houston, dove into those roots in a book called Truly Texas Mexican: A Native Culinary Heritage in Recipes (Texas Tech University Press).

“‘Texas Mexican’ is the cuisine that has evolved over centuries in the region immediately north and south of the lower Rio Grande,” he wrote in the introduction. “It is deeply rooted in the indigenous cultures of what are now northeastern Mexico and central and south Texas, the region where my extended family and all my Mexican American friends live.”

What it is not is Tex-Mex.

Although I’ve long been aware that much of what passes as Mexican cooking in the United States bears little relation to what you eat if you travel in Mexico, I suppose I’d always assumed that Tex-Mex was also the result of some kind of evolution — that early on it must have looked and tasted more like what Mexican-Americans might cook at home, what Medrano refers to as “comida casera.”

In fact, as Medrano wrote, the first Tex-Mex restaurant — named, in a remarkable display of hubris, The Original Mexican Restaurant — was created by an Anglo for Anglos. Specifically, the owner was Otis M. Farnsworth, an entrepreneur visiting San Antonio from Chicago. Furthermore, to make way for the rise of Anglo-driven Tex-Mex, the businesses of a “celebrated group of Mexican, Texas Indian businesswomen” were systematically destroyed, as Medrano tells it, and the women were harassed. Though today we know the name of the man who opened that first Tex-Mex dining room, the names of the women who fed the community before him, cooking out of open-air diners in the downtown market square, have been forgotten. We only know them as “The Chili Queens.” How easy to dismiss and even ridicule.

As Rachel Wharton pointed out in an excellent New York Times profile of Medrano last year: “Today Farnsworth’s restaurant might be called out for cultural appropriation, or what Mr. Medrano calls ‘cultural poaching.’ And Mr. Medrano does get angry at the lack of respect for his culture, the many ways in which Mexican-Americans have been wronged throughout history.”

At the time Wharton interviewed Medrano, in advance of the in advance of the publication of his second book, Don’t Count the Tortillas: The Art of Texas Mexican Cooking, Medrano expressed the view that Tex-Mex is a cuisine that should be respected and celebrated. “It’s just that Tex-Mex standards like queso and combo fajitas piled high with chicken and shrimp don’t speak of home to those whose Texas roots go back some 12,000 years,” she paraphrased him as saying.

So much has happened in the last year that I couldn’t help but wonder whether Medrano still holds that same hospitable view of Tex-Mex.

Though he’s busy in post-production of a 90-minute documentary, “Truly Texas Mexican,” that follows up on his first book, he was happy to illuminate his views on the phone with a Q + A. (scroll halfway down the story linked to find it). The documentary’s log line: “Texas chefs, artists and activists dig up the 15,000-year-old indigenous roots of today’s Texas Mexican food. A delicious combination plate of archaeology, politics and feminism, it definitely ain’t tex-mex!” He’s hoping to have it finished by the end of this month.

In any case it should, I think, be of concern to the proponents of Tex-Mex that the genre was born of a cultural sin.

How to atone? We can start by paying attention to comida casera. Often it’s what indigenous Mexican people are, as the name describes, cooking at home. But sometimes it’s also on the menu at your local mom and pop’s, if you skip down past the queso and combo plates and explore the guisados and the caldos.

And find a way to see Medrano’s documentary when it’s released. (It’ll definitely be announced in the Brenner Report.)

Last night I cooked a delicious dish, Camarón con Fideos de Calabacita — Shrimp and Squash Noodles, from Medrano’s newest book.

The basic ingredients, as the chef writes in the headnote, "are all native to the Texas Mexican region: tomato, tatuma squash, onion, chie, salt and Texas Gulf Shrimp.” He suggests substituting zucchini for the tatuma; the two are very similar.

Oh, one more thing — about that chicken dish that led me to chef Medrano. I spent my whole life calling it The Chicken that Killed Grandpa. Going forward, I’ll be referring to it as it was called when my mom found the recipe for it in the New York Times Magazine circa 1970: Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken. My family’s re-naming of it dishonors not only Grandpa, but also he dish’s author, Ms. de la Garza — whoever she was.

One day, I hope to find out. Until then, here is her chicken — which seems, according to everything I’ve read, to be a pretty clear example of Texas Mexican comida casera.

Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken

RECIPE: Camarón con Fideos de Calabacita

RECIPE: Rosa de la Garza’s Texas Chicken