Take two plates of plov and call me in the morning.
One of my favorite things about Queens is that there’s deliciousness around every corner: killer tacos down the street from a sex toy emporium; Chinese style nougat outside the Flushing LIRR; even Mexican seafood cocktails in the back of a bodega.
Today’s Twofer Tuesday—Uzbek plov and fruit pie from Greenway Health & Pharmacy, a drugstore/butcher/glatt kosher market in Rego Park—falls squarely in the latter category. Plov is a hearty Central Asian one-pot rice dish scented with cumin and studded with sweet bits of carrot that I’ve come to know and love after 20 years of living in the neighborhood.
Greenway’s excellent version uses beef, and is heavy on luscious nubs of carrot and also has chickpeas, and naturally, cumin. It’s made by a grandmotherly woman stationed next to the butcher counter. She also cooks up bakhsh, a plov variant that gets its greenish hue from coriander, parsley and dill; and a third type that features raisins. (more…)
