Persian Beef Kabob & Rice

Today felt a little bit like an episode of "Chopped". I was given a chunk of beef, a Persian rice cooker and three tomatoes. Persian rice cooker? I've never even heard of one before.

I'm sure the rice cooker had instructions, but we couldn't find them. The extent of David's Persian rice cooking knowledge amounted to "turn it up to 4". And Laura was again "busy with the baby". 

Google machine to the rescue. A Persian rice cooker is not an Asian rice cooker. It is huge and you put butter in with the water and rice. Then you dial in a number between 1 and 4. When the rice is finished boiling, stage two starts.  The element heats the bottom of the pan to make a very crispy brown crust on the rice. Number 1 is less crusty. 4 is very crusty. When you flip it over onto a plate it looks like a  cake. So pretty. And pretty tasty.(And from now on when I overbrown the rice I can sound exotic and say: Oh, I meant to do that. It's Persian rice.)

The marinade for these kabobs started with an onion. Well, onion juice actually. I chopped the onion and then pureed it. Then I extracted as much onion juice as I could. I have never done this to an onion before. I had to put on the hood fan to take away the strong fumes. This had the unexpected result of putting Lillian to sleep. Apparently a loud, obnoxious fan is more effective than a lullaby.

Onion juice!

As for the kabobs, I cut the meat into strips (not cubes) 

and then marinated it in a mixture of:

Turmeric is so pretty.

3 heaping tablespoons of yogurt

juice of one onion

1 tbsp turmeric

juice of 1/2 lemon

3 garlic cloves, pressed

Marinated and ready to go!

Finally we barbecued everything.
I made some skewers of mushroom, zucchini and peppers. 
I'm told Persian kabobs always have grilled tomatoes accompanying them so I cut a few tomatoes in half and put them on the grill too.
Since vegetables take longer to cook, I didn't put the meat on the barbie until the vegetables were mostly cooked.
The marinade made the kebabs slightly tart - which was really nice with the beef and probably would be even better with chicken. David and Laura sprinkled sumac over everything while we listened to Yma Sumac.