So on Saturday we wandered down to Hawthorn and Readings bookshop and after an hour or so we emerged with a new cookbook Persiana by Sabrina Ghayour. Our Sunday tradition is that my son and I cook dinner together so Sunday morning was spent going through the book to find something yummy. Actually to be fair it was more of deciding which of the many yummys we were actually going to cook. After sadly noting that the fridge was bare of lamb shanks and chicken we decided upon a salmon main and a salad.

The book is lovely and one of its upsides is it will force us to travel far afield in search of ingredients we haven’t tried before. Our chosen recipes with sumac, pomegranate and dried rose petals sounded deliciously exotic. However dried rose petals was a bridge too far for a Sunday evening shop so we had to do a poor substitute and the salmon dish did suffer for it. Luckily our local supermarket Maxis was able to provide pomegranates and the Shirazi salad was beyond delicious.`

Shirazi Salad

Serving 4-6

Ingredients

• 1 cucumber
• 6 ripe vine tomatoes
• 1 red onion
• olive oil
• sea salt flakes
• black pepper
• juice of 1 lemon
• 2 heaped tsp of sumac
• 200g pomegranate seeds

Instructions

• Dice the cucumbers and the tomatoes.
• Add them to the salad bowl
• Finely dice the red onions and add them to the salad bowl
• Drizzle olive oil over the ingredients, season with sea salt and black pepper
• Add the lemon juice and mix.
• Sprinkle over the sumac and the pomegranate seeds, pop into the refrigerator and served chilled

The Tokar Estate was fair but didn’t quite match up to the brilliance of the salad.
Tokar Estate Pinot Noir, Yarra Valley AUS, 2011, $23, 7/10

I’m loving this cookbook so far and I’m looking forward to trying more recipes! I see Lamb Shanks in my future.

Links

• Tokar Estate Wines
• Persiana by Sabrina Ghayour

Tags: Recipes, Red Wine // Add Comment »