One good aspect (of many) of working at a food co-op is that I’m surrounded by people who like food and have a great wealth of food recipe suggestions. I can simply ask my co-workers for dinner suggestions when I’m drawing a blank. Recently, my co-worker was coordinating a class on how to make Iraqi Biryani and shared the recipe with me. It was a surprisingly hearty and satisfying meal. The recipe my co-worker shared with me is here, but I made a few modifications. For some protein, we added ground turkey and instead of vermicelli pasta, we used half a bag of brown rice pasta which we had in our pantry. I followed the recipe, and then after frying the almonds, raisins, and peas, I cooked the turkey in the already hot pan. I cooked the brown rice pasta as I normally would (letting sit in hot water) and then added the already cooked pasta to the turkey along with the cooked almonds, raisins, and peas and continued with the recipe from there. The great thing about this recipe is that it seems fairly flexible to what we may have on hand. We’ll definitely be making this again!
