A taste of the Middle East

Chef and food writer Yasmin Khan chats to LAUREN TAYLOR about bringing some Persian and Pakistani flavours to her vegetarian cooking

- LAUREN TAYLOR

INSPIRED by her husband's vegetarianism and the food of her grandparents’ farm, chef and food writer Yasmin Khan wants to bring the Iranian and Pakistani flavours of her mixed heritage into plant-based cooking at home.

“I feel so passionately about sharing the positive, personal connections I have with the Middle East, which is such a beautiful part of the region, but which unfortunately only makes news for the wrong reasons,” says the 44-year-old, after air strikes by Israel and the US on Iran, in the midst of the war in Gaza. “It’s so heartbreaking.”

Yasmin’s grandparents were farmers in an agrarian region of northwest Iran. “That's really where my love of food, food growing and vegetables came from,” she says. “Like anyone who's been around fresh produce growing up, you just get such reverence from it, because you know how hard people work to grow it.”

But life as a small-scale farmer is hard, she writes in her latest cookbook, Sabzi, and the fraught political situation in Iran in the Eighties as well as the Iran-Iraq war “enveloped every aspect” of her family’s day-to-day living.

Predominantly rice farmers, her grandparents also grew “tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, herbs, aubergines, potatoes, onions, garlic, butternut squash, pumpkin, and then loads and loads of fruit trees as well. So everything from pomegranate to plums and kiwis,” she notes.