"On rainy days alone I dine Upon a chick and pint of wine"

This weekend's noteworthy happenings included tripping over something (a cat? my own feet?) and taking a flying header across the kitchen with my hands full of groceries, and learning an awesome new recipe.

Since the flying header did not end in any major damage to me (wounded pride, some bruises, and a slight soreness behind my left knee -- tweaked hamstring?), let's talk about the nifty thing to eat instead, shall we?

The awesome new recipe is a Persian chicken-and-chickpea dumpling called gundi.

(Aside: I am going to call the cuisine Persian on the grounds that most of the Persians I've met are quite firm on preferring to be called Persian rather than Iranian. The reasons for this are, I think, largely political.)

I know squat-all about Persian cooking in general, other than nearly every recipe I've seen makes me think 'dang, that sounds good.'

So when the New York Times printed an article last week on Passover as celebrated by Persian Jews I was all over the recipes.

And the recipes do sound good, but it was the reference to gundi that sent me to the search engine. That turned up a recipe from the Los Angeles Times (gundi recipe) plus a few additional recipe sites with the same recipe. The accompanying text on the LAT site suggests that the source is one of Joan Nathan's cookbooks (and Joan Nathan did write the NYT article), but I'm not quite sure who to credit as the source, or even what day the LAT printed the recipe (March 19 or 20 of this year, I think).

I made the recipe as written, with the exception of using two quarts of ready-made organic chicken broth (the stuff in the boxes) instead of making the broth from scratch. Perhaps it's just a result of living so near to Perdue, but ground chicken is easily available here and cheaper than ground turkey, so I used that. I did not have to add extra water; perhaps I had extra juicy onions.

The thing I would do differently next time is I'd whisk the chickpea flour and spices together before adding the onions and ground chicken. Adding the spices in last made it hard to get the turmeric distributed evenly, and thus my dumplings were a little streaky instead of uniformly golden. That's strictly a cosmetic complaint, however. Streaky or not, the dumplings were amazing.

Jonathan Swift