Hello, I'm Lale Arakoglu and welcome to women who travel, a podcast for anyone who is curious about the world and excited to explore places both near and far from home. There are certain foods that are practically ubiquitous in every country.

Bread, noodles, for example.

Rice is one of them, a core component of meals that you cross-pass with

in so many different ways when you're travelling. In Japan, I would often end up having rice for

breakfast, lunch and dinner across a glorious array of dishes. Summer dinners in my father's home

country of Turkey inevitably involve rice with kebabs or some other delicious

grilled meat. In fact, rice in the Middle East is not just limited to Turkey, of course,

and there are commonalities found across Palestinian, Lebediz and Iranian food. There's something

communal about eating rice. And one of my favorite rice dishes is Tadig,

a traditional Iranian dish that you flip out of the pot like a pancake

so that the crispy side sits at the top,

and you all get to crack through it like an egg.

Rice and Tadig. Tadig is the crispy part of the rice at the bottom of the pot, which is a lot of fun.

You can flip it like a cake, and there's a big ta-da moment, or as my friend says, a big

Tadegh moment.

So it's evolving and it's that becoming more and more popular, and that is a good thing.

Nazdaravian, my L.A.-based guest this week,

dedicates the title of her cookbook to it,

Bottom of the Pot, Persian Recipes and Stories.

It won a 2019 Julia Child Foundation Award,

and with Iran's current uprising,

her stories about her bonds with her country

...