Kamyar Enshayan: Transcript

Iranian Food Traditions, Cedar Falls
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One of the things, yeah, I miss the most, certain fruits that were not for sale most of the time that you would harvest. Fig trees—there were fig trees and we would climb up and harvest figs.

My name is Kamyar Enshayan. I live in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and I was born in Northern Iran. In my job here at University of Northern Iowa, I coordinate the UNI Local Food Project, which strives to connect people around here to make it easier for residents of our community to find locally grown food. We work with restaurants, with grocery stores, with institutions, and help them to connect to farmers and processors that supply seasonal local food. And it has been going on—I’ve been doing this work for ten years in our metro area.

I grew up in a rice-growing part of Iran. Northern Iran is very rainy, full of a lot of orchards, tea growing. So there’s the whole region that kind of is like California and Florida kind of combined. There’s a lot of citrus production and everything.

The main meal is usually lunchtime. And it involves rice and something that goes on top of the rice. And usually it’s a seasonal vegetable. The little bit of meat they have is mostly for flavor, a key thing. And then there are chicken dishes and lamb and other dishes.

I’m kind of mostly familiar with the meals that my family prepared. Some of the meals were very unique to that region. Some of my friends here in Cedar Falls who are from Iran, they don’t know those dishes. Because they didn’t grow up in that part the country. One example is a dish, which is called mirza qasemi, which is an eggplant dish. It’s with a lot of garlic, and eggplant, and tomatoes combined with some salt. Eggplant season—you use a lot of eggplant dishes.

Just last weekend I was with some other Iranian friends and I told them about a dish that I often make at home here called beedj beedj [phonetic]. And they didn’t know what it was. And it basically is kind of like a sloppy joe, but you put it on top of rice. And it has other flavors than sloppy joe.

So that’s another thing. Whenever we talk with my daughter about, you know, what are some unique Iranian foods? You know, what are some, well, seasonal fruits and vegetables that people really like? You know, one of the key ones, you know, melons. It’s like, you can have just melon parties. You know, people just get together and have melon.

We had lettuce parties, you know. Like during the lettuce season, people would just get together and have a lot of lettuce. And we would have these lettuce dips that you would dip the lettuce in.

There’s a lot of things that are made of ice. It’s interesting. So this one is called faludeh, which is kind of this—noodles, like rice noodles? But they’re kind of frozen. And so there’s white rice noodles in a mixture of ice slush—that’s sweet, and you add lime to it, and you eat it. And it’s just unbelievable! It’s an incredible flavor!

And there are other drinks. One is called yakh darb behesht, which means ice in heaven, in translation. And there are many flavors of that. So it’s very interesting to go to an Iranian grocery store like in Chicago and Minneapolis.

I guess I was fortunate that my mom would assign me to go and do the grocery shopping. And I would get on my bike and go to the market, almost every day. Farmers around would bring all their stuff. And you were so close to food. I remember all these dishes that emphasized particular items that were in season and abundance.