Chicken with Apricots & Pomegranates (Khoreshe Anar)

My grandma's home where I grew up was the nucleus of the family, and my mom was the head chef.  And she cooked army sized portions.  Family dinners were a near daily occurrence; in our house lived my grandmother, myself, my mom, and my mom's younger brother, but my mom's two older sisters didn't live that far away so they were over all the time with their kids as well and we always had enough food for random visitors to pop by. So what kind of food did we eat?

Well it was mainly an eclectic blend of Hawaiian fusion dishes, American, Italian, & Mexican cuisine, prominent emphasis on Hawaiian.  Though my grandma was Italian, she was married at the age of 14 (!! yes, I know, it was a different time then), so she learned a lot of her cooking skills from her Hawaiian mother-in-law, as did my mom and aunts.  The flavors of soy sauce and ginger were highly prominent in our kitchen, and all the girls would often form an assembly line to fold hundreds of wontons to go with the army-sized pot of fried rice my mom would be making.

But more on that another time.  I will definitely post some of my Hawaiian family recipes here, but today I want to talk a little about Persian cuisine.  In recent years in my quest to connect with my other roots, I've been cooking up some Persian recipes.  Pinterest has been great for finding recipes since obviously I didn't grow up around my Persian family, and I also found a great book on Amazon called "In a Persian Kitchen" by Maideh Mazda that has simple to follow instructions and anecdotes about the origins of some of the dishes.  Unfortunately the book doesn't have pictures though, so I hope how I prepare the dishes is true to intended form.

Recently, there was a post on the Humans of New York blog when the photographer was visiting Tabriz in Iran.  The photo is of a man and his son, and the father tells the story of how they buy a bag of 2lbs of apricots in the store, but on his way home when he asks his son for one of the apricots, his son has handed them all out already.  Beautiful story of a future humanitarian in the making.  Well, President Obama happened to comment on this story, and it gained a lot of attention.  Obama's comment received over 5,000 replies, and many of them were pretty positive.  Many Iranians who commented reacted very warmly and invited the president to Tabriz to try the most delicious apricots in the world.

So this brings me to Khoreshe Anar, which is one of my favorite recipes from In a Persian Kitchen.  There isn't any story behind this stew, but maybe it is a regional dish from Tabriz (any Persians out there who can verify?)  Persian cuisine has a wonderful way of joining fruit with meat and mixing sweet with savory to create something beyond delicious.  This particular dish I've never seen in any Persian restaurant I've been to, so I don't have anything to compare my home made version to, but nonetheless, it is a go-to recipe and my most often requested dish from my fiance Stephen.  I have made a few modifications from the recipe in the book to simplify.

Khoreshe Anar

Ingredients:

2-3 lbs chicken cut into chunks (I prefer thigh meat)

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp poultry seasoning

1/4 tsp pepper

1/4 tsp paprika

1 1/4 cups water

1 onion (finely chopped)

1 cup pomegranate seeds

15-20 dried apricots (I prefer Turkish apricots from Trader Joe's or Sprouts)

1/4 cup lemon juice

1/2 cup sugar

**Recipe calls for total of 6 TBSP of butter & 4 TBSP of shortening, but 

I've used ghee (clarified butter) or whatever oil I've had on hand, and adjusted the amount for whatever can comfortably fry the different components of the stew.

Saute the chicken with all the dry seasonings until golden.  Add water and let simmer on a low fire for 25-30 minutes.  Saute onions in butter until golden, then add pomegranate seeds.  Rinse the dried apricots a few times and add them to the onions & pomegranate seeds, then add all of these to the chicken.  Mix lemon juice and sugar and add to the chicken.  Simmer for about 20 minutes, and then serve with rice.  Basmati rice is good, but this dish will taste great with any kind of rice.

Alternatively, I've used the slow cooker on this one.  After basically browning all the components, I've thrown it all in the slow cooker, added the water & lemon juice-sugar mixture, and left on low while at work and come home to a great meal.

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