Category: Eclectica
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Prayer Goes Out; Food Goes In: Plum Chicken with Bibi Kasrai
The day I spoke with the author of The Spice Whisperer, Bibi Kasrai, she was busy with her new enterprise, a cooking camp for children. She had left a career as a corporate executive to do what she loves: cooking and teaching. That day the children were making hummus, croque-monsieurs, and popsicles. It’s this mix…
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Iran Elections: Celebration Now, A Long and Unpredictable Path Ahead
Photo from Instagram user alirezamalihi of celebrations in Tehran This is an excerpt of my latest piece on Global Voices. In the past few days there have been threats against the families of BBC reporters. The Internet in Iran was slowed to a crawl. The Iranian Cyber Army launched botnet attacks against a number of…
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Bare Bones Overview of Iran’s Election System
Here is a bare bones overview of the structure of Iran’s election system that I am presenting in Amsterdam on June 14, 2013. Hope you all enjoy it.
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Taste of Iran: Lari Kebab Made as a Stew
I loved the concise flavors of this dish, but learned that in order to replicate them I had to have the best ingredients. Taste of Iran: Lari kebab recipe Iranian student in Italy recreates a traditional dish – with a twist Lari kebab served with salad and jasminebasmati rice. Photograph: Tori Egherman The Leaning Tower…
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Blast from the Past: Thoughts on Rafsanjani’s 2005 Campaign
I wrote this piece in 2005 when the elections for Iran’s next president were in full swing. During the campaigns, I walked through my neighborhood with my headscarf around my shoulders. Music blared from black SUVs. Change was in the air…
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Why I Love Facebook
I am irresistibly drawn to Facebook, like a moth to the flame. Oh I know it could burn me, but the light is so very pretty.
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Cooking Aubergine Stew with Halleh Ghorashi
(Or as we Americans call it: Eggplant) Before going to Iran, I had eaten only stale, tasteless turmeric that added colour rather than flavour. On my first full day in Iran, I had a dish of eggplant stuffed with ground lamb, topped with unripe grapes, and seasoned with turmeric. I thought it was cinnamon, even…
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The Speech Squeeze
Poker. Rumi. The US Postal Service motto: Neither snow nor rain nor heat…Serendipity. All have their roots in ancient Persia. No matter how much you think you know about Iran, there’s always more. It’s no surprise, then, that you know so little before boarding a plane to take you to Tehran.
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The Beauty Regime
When I first started living in Iran, I was a kind of an illiterate, exotic creature who had to learn the alphabet from scratch and could have meaningful conversations only with toddlers. I was tolerated and coddled in equal measures, which made life easier for me. My mistakes were cute and lovable instead of breaches…
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Too Much Is Never Enough: Making Ghelye Mahi
Every time we had people over for dinner, my husband would say to me, “Tori, we didn’t make enough food.”
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Unveiling Iran
In 1978 and 1979, life in Iran drastically changed. This was especially true for women and girls, who once again found themselves and their bodies the focus of revolutionary change. Decades earlier they’d been forced to give up the veil in the name of modernity. Now they were forced to put it back on. They…
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You Can’t Say That in School
“I don’t know how I could protect my child or explain why some things are okay to talk about and why some things are not. It’s hard for me to imagine.”