Teaching foodies and anyone who would like to who would love to cook healthy food, to confidently create the Persian dishes of my Iranian heritage and to combine ingredients according to the Ancient Middle Eastern health-giving system of Unani. When Covid-19 struck the UK and the Govt required my Cafe Bar (The Butterfly House at The Torrs) to be kept shut , the opportunity to create Jilah’s Tiny
Kitchen was created. It was born out of the Live Facebook Demo’s that I started to do in my “tiny kitchen” to show my Butterfly House customers how do prepare certain Persian dishes in their own homes. The success of these Live posts led me to create Jilah’s Tiny Kitchen Online Cookery School ... a project that I had for about a year, been musing over but until that time been too busy to create. As an Anglo-Iranian, my Iranian heritage has always come alive for me through Persian Cuisine. Some of my earliest memories exist on my tongue! Flavours of my Maman Borzorg’s Saffron Rice, the cool refreshing Sharbat drinks she used to make in the Summer, her deliciously seasoned Chicken, her Dolmas, her Gormeh Sabzi, Gaz (Iran’s answer to Noughat), Persian Icecream (OMG! Persian Icecream!!!!) to name but a few! Whenever we visited her as a child, I used to spend as much time as I could in her kitchen (her mini Empire) watching and asking questions, smelling and tasting, writing her recipes down with her advice about quantities and spices. As I grew older my need to re-create those flavours became almost an urgent compulsion as it was my one route to feeling “Persian” in my totally British life. I remember her stories of how she fled with her family over the border into Iran from their home in Azerbaijan when that part of the Persian Empire was given to the Russians, and how, being one of the wealthy merchant families, they had to endure the Bolshevik Communists coming to their home in big lorries and clear their house out of all their possessions leaving them only the basics to survive with. Each time they replaced these items, the Govt would clear their house out again and after the 3rd time this happened her Father instructed that the family would leave with only the clothes on their back and banning her mother from hiding any valuables in the soles of her shoes, they left and crossed the newly formed border into Iran never to return again. I would listen enraptured by her accounts of her life and feel enriched by learning about my family history and cultural heritage. These stories are what surround me when I am in my own tiny kitchen trying to recreate her flavours. It made me realise that in this world of perpetually changing circumstances and the fast flow of historical moments which shape-change the content of our lives from generation to generation, that the one thing which can exist as a consistent thread of cultural identity and family heritage is our recipes and like the stories passed down, our tongues hold glimmers of memories in our taste buds which can act almost like a homing radar to connect us back to our family ancestry. I love cooking this incredibly diverse and health giving cuisine which is steeped in Persian culture and my own family heritage. You will see that I have this page, a website www.jilahstinykitchen.com and also an Instagram Page too. If you go to my website store you can see that I sell 1:1 and 1:Group cooking sessions via Zoom. and have recipes and recipe bundles for sale too. The cooking sessions include the Recipes and the Video afterwards for you to refer to and keep in your Library of Jilah’s Tiny Kitchen resources. Central to authentically traditional Persian Cuisine is the ancient principle of Unani. Unani is a system that selects the ingredients in a dish according to their Hot and Cold properties. These properties either heat or cool the blood and in turn either create balance or imbalance in the body. If you break down each ingredient according to their properties in any of the classic Persian Recipes, you will discover that each one offsets the other creating a kind of neutrality and to balance each-other and in so doing, each dish should create harmony and a balanced equilibrium within ones body. You can also restore an out of balance body with the foods and dishes that you eat too. For example, when my daughters were little, if they suddenly came out in a rash, the first thing we did was to give them Natural Live Yoghurt. With its cold properties, Yoghurt is cooling and the existence of a rash indicates over heating of the body. Literally within the hour of having given them Yoghurt, the rash would be gone! (obviously if the rash had persisted we would have sought another solution with the Dr, but food balancing properties have always been our first port of call). Seasonal temperatures also inform which meals are generally eaten at which time of the year too to maintain a balance and give the body what it most needs. Whilst most Iranians are familiar with Unani to a greater or lesser extent, with modernisation and changing roles for women in Iran that require them to combine working with home-making, pre made meals and less time spent learning the “old ways” with their parents and the older generation mean that slowly these principles of food preparation and recipe creation are in some cases being applied less. This is why through Jilah’s Tiny kitchen, I include these principles of Unani in what I teach, to keep it alive as I love the whole concept of of creating dishes that are not only very tasty but also have some impact on maintaining our body’s calm equilibrium and good health. Keep an eye on my Events Page for up-coming teaching sessions and enjoy the posts that I put on this page which I hope will give you a new dimension to your enjoyment of cooking.
