- From crunchy rice to fresh herbs and locally baked bread.

Chef Louisa Shafi loves sharing the simple pleasures of classic Persian cuisine.

So I was more than happy to accept when she invited me into her Nashville kitchen for a taste of her Iranian heritage.

Louisa, I'm so excited to be here with you today.

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

- Well, I am super excited too.

I am a chef and food writer, and I specialize in Persian cuisine.

And I also have an online store called Feast by Luisa, where I sell Persian culinary creations and supplies like spices and Persian spiced chocolate bars, and cardamom coffee, and all kinds of cool stuff.

- Louisa, I know that you're an author.

Tell us about your most recent book and what inspired it.

- My most recent cookbook is the New Persian Kitchen.

For me, it's about so much more than food.

It's really been a journey to figuring out my own identity because I grew up in Philadelphia, pretty much removed from the rest of my extended Iranian family who was either still in Iran or when they came to the US they came to California.

So I didn't really know that much about my culture, but food has been my way in and it's been an excuse to hang out with all my relatives and spend real quality time with them and you know, do this intimate thing of cooking together and to have a deeper conversation with any Iranian person that I meet.

And it's really helped me figure out my own place in the world.

- Would you say Iranian food is difficult to prepare?

Is it approachable when people are going through this cookbook?

Can beginners get into this?

I - Love that question.

The whole goal with my cookbook was to make Persian food more accessible to people, especially people like me that may have grown up tasting this cuisine, but never actually learned how to make it.

So, yes, Persian cuisine can be really easy.

Okay.

And there's nothing that tricky about it.

It just can be time consuming.

I see.

But you know, there's shortcuts like with everything.

Oh my gosh.

We are gonna have a little feast here.

One of the most common things that you will eat in Iran is a platter of herbs, cheese, and bread.

It can be an entire meal or it can be an accompaniment to a meal.

And it's one of the ways that we have to take advantage of tasting all the different herbs that we love and that we grow.

- What's one of your favorite dishes to prepare and serve - From your cookbook?

I love to make rice for people, especially people that have never tasted Persian food.

Rice is a blank palette for us, and you could think of it like the way you would think of pasta in Italian cuisine.

- Okay.

- It can be very, very, very simple, or it can be dressed up with, you know, nuts and seeds and fruit and meat.

One of my favorite things to make for people is the crispy rice at the bottom of the pot.

Oh.

Which is called tig.

And one of my favorite sounds in the world is hearing people eat tig and making the crunchy sound that that makes in your teeth.

Yeah.

And knowing that I made that for them, it just gives me so much joy.

Here we go.

- I mean, you're very crunchy.

You stay busy as a chef, but then also are really an advocate for immigrant families here in this community.

So from your experience then, has food been kind of a vehicle to bring people together and bridge across - Differences?

It just opens people up and they just naturally start to learn about my heritage and the culture of Iran, which they probably knew nothing about.

'cause if you only looked at the news, you only see these crazy headlines that portray very dramatic and usually negative things.

So it gives people a way to learn about another culture just in a natural, organic way on kind of a human scale.

And one of the things people always ask me is, where can I get these ingredients locally?

And then I get to tell them about all the wonderful Kurdish markets that we have here and exactly where they can find authentic Iranian bread, freshly made in a wood-fired oven.

And then they wanna go explore that part of town where immigrants live, and it just organically follows from there.

It it, it just works.

What do you hope to achieve as a chef and a neighbor in this community of Nashville in the future?

Well, I love turning people on to food from this part of the world and bringing people together around food.

I feel like Nashville is honestly such a welcoming and open place and people are eager for new food experiences, especially that it's been really easy to do here.

It's, it's a great community that's very welcoming.

Yeah.