Meet Roya & Tracy

My name is Roya, which means “dream” in Farsi.

I am a creator, adventurer, author, dreamer, entrepreneur, and lover of plant-based food. I am also on the search for the tastiest plant-based meals in the world.

I’m half Persian and half American. My parents met in Gainesville, Florida in the ’70s, and I like to think that they were each drawn to the other being the exotic one in the relationship.

My Mom fell in love with Persian culture and quickly taught herself to speak Farsi, and through the years, she learned to make Persian food so well that even the Iranian women in her orbit started asking for her recipes.

When I was a kid, my mom spoke Farsi to me. I actually learned Farsi before I learned English. My older brother didn't speak English until he was four years old! Of course, today we both speak perfect English and now I need to brush up on my Farsi skills. At the time I thought my Mom was Persian, because we spoke Farsi and she made Persian food. I don’t remember how old I was when I finally realized that she was in fact not Persian! Maybe it was when my grandparents came to visit from Florida for the first time. I spoke Farsi to them and they didn’t answer back, which raised my eyebrows.

My Mom always made us tasty treats. I remember coming home from school so excited to see what sort of snack awaited me. I didn’t care that we weren't allowed to drink soda or Kool-Aid or eat Lunchables (when was a candy bar ever considered “food?”). I didn’t miss any of that, because I knew whatever my Mom had made for us would be way better. It didn’t matter what it was, but some of my favorites were her gingersnap cookies, famous brownies, a big bowl of Ash Reshte (a nourishing Persian soup; Beans and Greens Soup), or my favorite Persian dish, Zereshk Polo (though now it's a tie between Adas Polo, which you can find on Date & Lentil Rice, and the Zereshk Polo on Rice with Barberries).

Even as a kid when most people considered throwing something in the microwave and calling it dinner good enough. I loved eating my mom's homemade cooking. It became second nature to me to appreciate and make food from scratch with love.

My mom instilled a love of exotic food, languages, and places in me from a young age. She encouraged me to be independent and say “yes” to adventure. I remember the first time I flew by myself, I was 11 years old. I wasn’t nervous in the slightest! I thought: “I’m 11, I got this, no problem!” I had no idea how nervous she was as I waved goodbye and hopped on the plane!

For as long as I can remember, food has been a big part of my life, but in the beginning, I’ll admit cooking was a bit intimidating to me. It felt like everything had to happen fast and all at once and didn’t involve baking’s precision and exact measurements.

When I was seven years old I got my first Easy-Bake oven and fell in love with baking. I couldn't get enough of making tiny cakes in all different flavors. My two brothers would line up and place their orders for the type of cake they wanted. I would get to work mixing, beating, and attempting to make the perfect cake…baked using a lightbulb in a tiny oven.

Eventually, I graduated to using a real oven, and before too long I was baking chocolate chip cookies, lemon bars, and cakes. These became my new obsessions. We were a large family, so of course I always doubled the recipe. There were always customers for my lemon bars and cookies and I never had to worry about eating them all by myself. That changed when I moved out and made my way to San Francisco, and suddenly it was just me. Baking in such large amounts suddenly didn’t make sense.

I enjoyed baking for parties and friends' weddings. One time I made over 300 poppy seed muffins in my tiny San Francisco apartment. I hadn’t thought ahead to have a large enough container to mix the wet and dry ingredients together. It all worked out when I found a new bucket I had bought to organize clothes in my closet and instead used it as my mixing bowl.

Another time I made 150 lemon bars for my best friend's wedding. I thought for sure there would be some to take home at the end of the night, but much to my surprise there wasn't a single bar left!

Around this time I really started to miss Persian food. Whenever my mom came to visit, we would cook together and I would relive my childhood through the meals we shared. I realized making Persian food together was an enormous part of our family history. Everything needed to be documented in some way. My Mom came to the same conclusion, and thus the idea to create a cookbook was born.

We realized, though, that traditional Persian cooking no longer worked for our plant-based lifestyles. We had to reinvent the wheel and figure out a way to keep or more ideally, improve upon the recipes we had eaten throughout my entire life!

This was not an easy feat.

We realized we had our work cut out for us. We also had a high bar for quality and knew we couldn’t accept creating Persian recipes that were merely “good” or “acceptable.” We agreed that, because we were removing the meat and dairy, it was imperative to make the recipes even better than they were before! It was a challenge we were excited about, and more than ready to take on.

Our goal was to make the very best vegan Persian food. Our cookbook would offer Persian food so unbelievably good that nobody would miss the meat or ask, “why doesn't my Ghormeh Sabzi have lamb in it?”

Thus, The Vegan Persian Kitchen was born. It quickly became our baby, and after testing hundreds of recipes over many long days which turned into months in the kitchen, we had a book that we felt was worthy of sharing with the world.

Love,

Roya

My name is Tracy.

When I was six years old, my parents told me that my name meant “strong, bold, and courageous.” Since that day I’ve tried to live up to its meaning through my actions.

I am a writer, producer, filmmaker, and culinary artist. Growing up in a small Florida town, food was very important to our family. We were all expected to gather nightly for family dinner, which often included both sets of grandparents who lived nearby. My mother, a bargain shopper, would prepare food from what was on sale that week. This usually meant what was in season. My father appreciated her efforts and we looked forward to the good food she prepared, as well as to each other's company at the table.

I started experimenting in the kitchen at a young age. My mother bought me the ingredients I needed and I would check out cookbooks from the local library. I was an avid reader and loved stories of foreign and exotic lands, people, and cultures. Our local grocery store, however, did not share that same love. Any even slightly exotic ingredient dared not grace the store's shelves. That left me with Betty Crocker’s cookbook as my go-to for recipes at the time. It was hardly exotic, but it was a suitable base for realizing future cooking skills.

When I was in my late teens, our family decided to move to Gainesville, Florida, a university town. At the same time, the University of Florida decided to extend foreign student visas to Iranian students to study in the US. Seemingly overnight there was an influx of Iranians in town. One of those Iranians became my husband. I found his culture to be wildly interesting and wholly different from my own. I immersed myself in learning Farsi the Persian language, and enjoyed the exotic cuisine, which included newfound flavors such as rose water, saffron, and cardamom.

I began learning to cook Persian food with much trial and error. The ingredients were still hard to come by even in a diverse university town, and we had no Middle Eastern markets accessible to us.

As we counted the years, my husband and I moved to California. There, we found a thriving Iranian community in west Los Angeles. I soon discovered small Persian markets with heavily stocked shelves overflowing with aromatic basmati rice, fresh herbs, all kinds of greens, pomegranate paste, Persian barberries, saffron, rose water, pistachios, and intoxicatingly exotic spices.

This opened up a whole new universe for me! After work, I cooked all types of Persian foods. On the weekends I would throw lavish dinner parties, and eventually, I started catering weddings.

This was an interesting state of affairs…I remember a particular Persian wedding in San Francisco where the guests liked the food so much they asked to meet the chef. I walked out of the kitchen to over 200 guests craning their necks, peering behind me for a peek at the nonexistent Persian chef. No one believed the blonde American woman standing before them had cooked all that Persian food! It was a moment that has repeated itself in various ways over the years.

Eventually, I became interested in vegetarianism. I loved vegetables and rarely ate meat, although I cooked it for others. I still, however, relied heavily on cheese and dairy in my meals. Life went on as it tends to do, and as our family expanded I enjoyed making delicious meals for the home table. I felt good and thought I was eating a healthy diet, but on a routine doctor's visit, I was diagnosed with cancer. I was the first in my family, with no prior cancer diagnoses on either parent's side.

I conducted my own research and began leaning more and more toward a plant-based diet. I always considered myself an animal lover, but could no longer justify to myself that it was acceptable to love and care for dogs and cats on one hand but eat pigs and cows on the other.

I began making a film called 100 Days in the Raw. The central idea was that a group of us ate exclusively raw, plant-based food for 100 days. In the film, I visited a cattle ranch where the cows were treated incredibly well up until the day of slaughter. I rode herd with the cowboys and observed the gentle mother cows caring for their babies. I roamed the pastures with the herd and found them to be docile, non-threatening, curious, and shy creatures who enjoyed each other's company. On slaughter day I observed each cow being led to the slaughter block. The truth that became painfully apparent is that this was a living creature who had the will to live, wanted to live and could no longer because society in large wants their steaks and hamburgers. I could no longer ask a living, sentient being to sacrifice its life because I wanted to eat a piece of meat. And at that precise moment, I became vegan.

Overnight, the way I had formally cooked for all those years became obsolete. I still loved Persian food as did my family too, but now I could no longer in good conscience cook the same dishes we had enjoyed for so long. I set out on a new and daunting journey to not only recreate all of our favorite dishes, but to make them all 100 percent vegan.

Historically, I had never cooked with a recipe. I perfected each dish with a pinch of this and a dash of that. My daughter Roya kept encouraging me to document these recipes, as she was also in the process of eliminating animal products from her diet. Together we embarked on a multi-year project and began developing, documenting, and testing recipes. Together we spent long days and endless hours in the kitchen, tweaking, tasting, testing, measuring, weighing, and creating each recipe. Hence, The Vegan Persian Kitchen was born.

One of Roya’s many talents is that she is an award-winning photographer. Each day she would design, style, set up, and photograph each recipe for our book. This process created an even stronger mother-daughter bond between us, and we are proud of what we have accomplished. Our hope is that you and your family will enjoy our recipes and food together. Food is the great equalizer: one that nourishes body, mind, and soul. If our cookbook encourages you to cook or even simply eat together with family and friends, then we will have accomplished our goal.

Nushe joon!

With love & light,

Tracy

Tracy’s Cooking Philosophy: A Journey of Love and Flavor

Welcome to The Vegan Persian Kitchen, a place where the pleasure of cooking unfolds, and love fills the air! Over the years, my cooking journey has been shaped by countless experiments, happy accidents, and delicious successes. For me, cooking isn’t just a task; it’s a heartfelt endeavor that brings joy to both myself, as well as to the friends and family that I am fortunate to be able to share a meal with.

Every time I step into the kitchen, I’m reminded that cooking is truly a labor of love. I believe that food has the power to connect us, to nourish our bodies, and to create lasting memories around the table. There’s something incredibly special about gathering with family and friends, breaking bread together, and engaging in conversations that make us feel alive and cherished.

When I cook, I dive in with all my senses. First things first: we eat with our eyes! I love preparing dishes that are not only delicious but also visually appealing. The vibrant colors of fresh vegetables, beautifully plated meals, and an enticing presentation are just as important as the flavor. But it doesn’t stop there! The aroma wafting through the kitchen is an invitation that’s hard to resist. I take great pleasure in creating scents that beckon loved ones closer.

Let’s not forget the sound of cooking, too! The rhythmic chopping of fresh veggies, the sizzle of onions dancing in hot oil, and the gentle bubbling of Ghormeh Sabzi or Ash Reshte on the stove—all of these sounds create a symphony that sets the stage for a delightful culinary experience.

And oh, the taste! The joy that comes from a dish well-prepared with love is unmatched. One of my golden rules is to play with flavors. Don’t hesitate to adjust seasonings to make a dish uniquely yours! A dash more salt, a sprinkle of pepper, or a splash of fresh lemon juice can transform a good meal into an unforgettable one. Remember, recipes are merely guidelines. Trust your instincts, and don’t be afraid to experiment. If a sauce is too thick, add a bit of water; if it’s too thin, let it simmer a little longer. Cooking is about finding that perfect balance that delights your palate.

So let’s embark on this delicious adventure together! Whether you’re a novice in the kitchen or a seasoned chef, I hope you find inspiration in our recipes and philosophies. Here’s to good food, great company, and the love that binds us all!

Happy cooking!

Tracy