Persian New Year Soup

One of the best things about working at Clover is that sometimes, your ideas get put on the menu. This fall I was talking to Rolando. He teaches world cuisine at Johnson and Wales, and they were covering Middle Eastern/Persian food. I said I had a soup for him to try.

I’m half Iranian, and I’d always watched my relatives spend hours finely chopping countertops of fresh dill, cilantro, green onions, parsley and spinach to make “ash,” a soup that’s traditionally eaten on Persian New Year in March. The green herbs are the soup  – rather than acting as garnishes or bulking up the flavor of other ingredients – so it comes out bright green in color.

Rolando and I made up a batch of a soup we started calling “Persian New Year.” A couple things changed from my family’s recipe. Since we make soups on-board the truck each morning, it had to be fast to make. Traditionally, the soup has long strands of Iranian noodles, which are hard to find and iffy to cook, so I replaced them with potatoes. Instead of finely mincing tons of green herbs by hand (which would take the entire morning)  Jeremiah suggested we roughly chop them and put the soup through the blender after cooking.

A lot of you tried “Persian New Year” soup when we ran it last week. Let us know what you thought. I might venture to say the soup born of Clover limitations actually tastes better than the original. But I’ll let our Iranian customers (Fareed, Sheba, and others) have the final say.