Food Friday: Roya Afghan Cuisine | Quabili Pallaw

I'm coming out of my self-imposed blogging hiatus to tell you about something very important: food. It's always food.

After about 6 years of wanting to expand my ethnic food horizons and eat some Afghan food, but always deciding instead to get Indian or Thai or Ethiopian or what-have-you, I finally committed and forced Jonathan and my mother to check out the highly-rated Afghan restaurant, Roya, in Downtown Livermore.

And that's why I'm here. To tell you that you need to go to Roya immediately—run, don't walk—and order the Quabili Pallaw (elsewhere often spelled "pilau" or "pallow"), pictured above. What you're looking at is a mountain of sweetly cooked carrots, juicy raisins, and browned basmati rice. What you don't see, because it's nestled snugly underneath, is the most tender lamb I have ever eaten, ever.

It flat out tastes like Christmas on a plate. This time of year, you better believe I'll be eating copious amounts of it whenever I'm feeling particularly chilly. It's possible I'll forget about other kinds of food forever, and sustain myself solely on this.