A Calm Storm

The blog of Sholeh Samadani Munion

Category: Cooking

Peanut and Coconut Curry Sauce

This sauce is really good over chicken, veggies, rice, etc. It makes enough for a family of 4 to cover at least one good-sized bowl of food. I add the sauce over everything at the end, but you could also…

Persian Kabob and Tahdig

Persian Kabob and Tahdig

I recently made ground beef kabob and chicken kabob, as well as Persian rice with tahdig (the crispy potato at the bottom). There are lots of recipes online so I don’t have the energy to put the whole process here,…

Hash brown Casserole

Hash brown Casserole

It looks a little strange in the photo (and I took it before adding the cheese on top), but this is a great meal to prep for the week. It’s also possible to make it vegetarian by removing the sausage/bacon….

Gluten Free Carrot or Apple Cake

Gluten Free Carrot or Apple Cake

A while back I wanted to make carrot cake and found this awesome recipe from Williams Sonoma. However, I needed to make some changes to it and after a certain point it stopped being the same recipe. So I’m putting…

Gluten free Persian kotlet

Last night I looked in my fridge to see what I could make with the ingredients I had. I whipped up some mashed potatoes and carrots, then realized I had some ground turkey meat defrosted in the fridge. So, using…

Lemon butter vegetable pasta

On Friday night we had one of those moments where we had no interest in going to the grocery store after work, so we considered the options in the fridge and decided to make do with what we had. I…

First Thanksgiving together

I love Thanksgiving. Everything about it. This year we got to have 2 Thanksgivings, on different days, and it was great. I can’t even look at ham or turkey anymore, though. I had my sister-in-law’s help with the first round,…

Thanksgiving: Part 1

I am feeling ambitious this year. I offered to help my mother cook some things in advance to alleviate the burden of cooking the giant meal. Our family, despite having a Persian element to some of our cooking, does the…

Figs, honey, & Brie

A few weekends ago I visited my parents, and my mother had purchased several varieties of figs. This has become my favorite fruit, & the seasonal window is so short that I eat a lot of them when they’re available….

Baked pears

The simplest thing when you need a quick dessert that looks fancy, or when the pears on your table are starting to go a little brown. Ingredients: 1 pear 3 tablespoons honey 2 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 teaspoon…

Current favorite smoothie

I feel like I got cheated out of my summer. I don’t know where it went. Today was an especially crazy Monday, and I needed something to unwind after a long day, but I really don’t need to eat more…

Spun sugar

A few months ago we were invited over to our friends’ house for dinner. Dinner was excellent, because Jade is a fantastic cook. But when we got to dessert, I nearly died and went to heaven. Everything was made from…

Chicken with spinach & cheese

Many of my cooking adventures begin because I am hungry, not because I carefully planned it. I look in the fridge, see what I have, and start cooking. The other night I got creative and got lucky. This recipe makes…

Food things

When I was little, I loved bleu cheese salad dressing.  If ever given a choice, I would choose that.  I don’t know why, especially because I find it rather revolting now (especially since it usually contains gluten). Most salad dressings…

Stuffed grape leaves (dolmeh)

For the Chicago Naw-Ruz celebration I made Persian dolmeh.  I had lent my favorite cookbook to a coworker, and realized that I needed to take another look at the recipe.  A quick Google search confirmed my fear: there were no…

Lemon Chicken Riso

I looked at the ingredients in my kitchen last week and realized I had the ingredients for a full meal (shocking, these days, since I’m rarely home!).  So why not? Ingredients 1 lb chicken breast, diced into cubes 1 package…

Thanksgiving

I think I ate too much. But all in all, it was very successful. A nice balance of family, friends, every meal imaginable, parties, & even some dancing! “SAY, by reason of your remembering Him Whom God shall make manifest…

Delicious Dinner

I realized recently that my meals have been consisting of a lot of Thai take-out and Mexican food. While this is delicious, it is not always healthy and I missed cooking. Last night I picked out a few ingredients from…

Persian Perfume

I should start my own perfume line.  It will be based on Persian cooking, mostly.  There will be “Kabob Koobideh“, which smells like it just came off of the grill, “Persian rice”, which has the fragrant aroma of rice and…

Chicken with mustard greens

Ingredients: onion, chopped a few slices of ginger, diced a few cloves garlic, diced salt pepper sesame oil soy sauce chicken breast, cut into small pieces peas chopped mustard greens 1. Fry onion, garlic, ginger, salt, and pepper in sesame…

Stuffed chicken

My mother got this cool stretchy netting from the deli counter at our grocery store, and told me that this is how they keep the stuffing inside the chickens and such things. I have no idea where to buy such…

upside-down apple cake

This afternoon I experimented with apple cake. I had to make something for a Thanksgiving party, and we had a lot of apples. So I found a recipe in a very old cookbook, and modified it because it was completely…

Tomato cream pasta sauce

Ingredients: 1 small onion, diced 2 tomatoes, diced a few leaves of fresh basil, chopped salt pepper 1 tsp tumeric 1 clove garlic, diced 1 tsp chili powder (optional) 1 pint heavy cream 2 tablespoons of tomato paste Fry the…

Soup and beets

I’ve been cooking a lot, since I’m not working. In between the bouts of kitchen experimentation, I put in job applications and cross my fingers. There are two dishes that I thought I would share with you. We ate the…

midnight snack

I got hungry when we came home from Baha’i Feast tonight at 11 pm. Being the slightly ridiculous person that I am when it comes to food, I decided to get creative. Ingredients: chopped onions & ginger ground beef quinoa…

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