At my house, the holidays are a time for cooking, the favorites and the familiar, while throwing in an experiment every now and then. One year, as we worked on some dishes of potatoes and ham and pies, we decided to make a salad. The interchangeable ingredients include crunchy and multicolored lettuce, radicchio, green apples, celery, fennel, and pomegranate seeds. The "Winter Salad" as we called it become a traditional dish, simple yet festive.
One of our guests on this week's show "In Search of Real Food," Samin Nosrat, also loves pomegranates. She adds the bright, tart arils to tabbouleh, and makes pomegranate molasses for a Persian chicken stew called Khoresh-e-Fesenjoon. Since we originally aired the show, Nosrat has launched a new project, traveling the world for a Netflix version of her book.
If you decide to cook with pomegranates over the holidays, you might wonder how to get the seeds out. Here's a quick video about how to do it. And happy eating and cooking this season. Let me know what you're cooking at listen@ttbook.org.
–Shannon