As I mentioned in my last post my mom is here visiting.  She brought along two incredibly valuable and priceless gifts with her:  Maman Fakhri and Khaleh Roffi’s recipe notebooks. Who ask who are they?? Maman Fakhri is my maternal granmother and Khaleh Roffi is her sister.  I was super close to both of them when they were alive.  I can’t tell you how emotional I felt the first time I held their hand written notbooks filled with recipes.

The pages are yellow and brittle yet their handwriting is intact and beautiful.  One of the recipes that we decided to make from my grandmother’s repertoire is Khoreshteh Narengee, tangerine stew because we had bought a whole lot of tangerines and they needed to be consumed.

I love tangerines, I really do, especially when they taste good. But I am not much of a fan of  fruit in my dishes. However, both my mom and I were intrigued by this recipes. Let me tell you it was simply DIVINE. We both fell in love at first bite and looked at each other completely bewildered at how good it tasted. Mind you, as it cooked the small of it flirted with our noses the whole time and it was ridiculously good. It was even better when we tasted it!

The following recipe is for two. We made half of the recipe because we had no idea how it was going to taste. Double or triple the recipe according to your needs. Also, we suggest using chicken with bone in for added flavor. We used chicken legs, but a combination of chicken legs and thighs is good as well.

Ingredient

4 chicken legs
4 medium carrots
1 lb  tangerines
1 small onion
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/2 tbsp flour
1 tbsp sugar
1/4 tsp ground saffron
oil
salt

Small dice onion and saute in oil until translucent. Season chicken legs with salt and add to the onion. Lightly brown on both all sides.

Grate carrots and saute in a bit of oil for about five minutes.

Add grated carrots to the chicken, add 1 and 1/2 cups of water, cover and cook for 30 minutes.

In the mean time sliver the tangerines’ peel and remove the bitterness. If you don’t have a zester or don’t know how to remove bitterness from tangerine please see my post How to Sliver and Remove Bitterness from Orange Peel

Place some oil in the same pan that you used for sauteing the carrots and add flour.

Mix well until the flour turns into a golden color. Then add the roux in to the chicken and carrots. Mix well so that the flour is well incorporated in the liquid.

One by one remove peel and section the tangerines. Make sure that there is no rind left.

Add lemon juice to the stew.

Add sugar.

Add ground saffron.

Add zest. Mix all well, add salt if needed and cook for another fifteen minutes.

Gently add the tangerines.

Cook for 5 minutes, long enough for the tangerines to warm through.

First place chicken in a serving dish. Gently remove the rest of the stew ingredients from the pot, place them around and on top of the chicken. Then pour the juices over it all. Garnish with tangerine zest and serve with Persian Rice!