Alo-balo polo

Alo-balo polo

It looks like southern-style glorified rice, but it's not. It's a Persian dish of chicken layered with tart-cherry rice. The recipe is from the Middle Eastern volume of the Time-Life Foods of the World series, and as we've learned, those folks didn't write any bad recipes!

Some of the rice is allowed to form a brown, buttery, caramelized crust (see that at the front edge?) and some of it is stirred with a saffron-butter mixture to make a color and flavor accent on top.

This recipe has lots of parts (and, I might add, it requires practically every dish in the kitchen) but it's really easy to make. The rich, sweet taste reminds us of something, but we are too busy shoveling it into our mouths to think about it for too long. Two thumbs up.