. A blogumn by Roya Hamadani One thing about being half of one thing and half of another is that I’ve quite never fit into either camp very nicely. I keep getting little things wrong, or I should say little things to me, but apparently huge clues to other people. However there are culinary benefits to a dual heritage, especially one as varied as mine. While Philippine cuisine relies heavily on pork and garlic, Iranian food is pork-less and nearly garlic free. And while Filipinos prize balut, the nearly fully developed embryo of a duck eaten whole, the Persians love a good grilled lamb testicle. The result of this gastronomical dichotomy was that we often had two dinners on the table. My mother ate her pork dishes, while my father ate his Persian stews of meat and vegetables, known as khoresh. Rice was the land bridge between them. Me, I ate it all. And what I discovered can only be described as divine. My gastronomic breakthrough, made purely by chance, combines all the goodness of adobo, whose fatty cubes of pork are caramelized by frying and then stewed until fork tender in a refreshingly acidic mixture of vinegar, soy sauce, garlic and bay leaf, with masta khiar, a Persian yogurt dish of shredded seedless cucumber, salt and pepper and pinch of dried mint. Put it all over rice, the great communicator, and just like that, you have reached heaven. The fresh crunch of cucumber and the tangy yogurt cut the richness of the pork to create a transcendental taste much bigger than the sum of its parts. It is manna, baby. And it’s this kind of moment, more than anything else, that makes me not only happy to be half and half, but a...