#8 Armenia
We made 5 Armenian dishes!
Itch, a bulgur pilaf with tomatoes and onions. The recipe, interestingly, just cooks the bulgur in the residual heat in the pan from sautéing the savory items; the bulgur itself doesn’t get any direct heat. It worked, and made for a nice, toothy pilaf consistency.Spinach and cheese Boregs, which are handheld spinach pies, made with phyllo dough. Here is the recipe we used.
Yalanchi, stuffed grape leaves. The recipe we used called for them to be steamed in an Instapot. I’m not sure that we translated the recipe’s directions to our machine very effectively, because they ended up a little mushy and maybe over-cooked? The filling was tasty, so we’d try it again and try to adjust the cooking.
Lahmajoun: Sam actually recalls this dish from his childhood, where they wild visit the Boston suburb of Watertown, which had a large Armenian population. We adapted this recipe to make it meat-free.
And finally, Ja’Jik, a chilled yogurt cucumber soup. This was good, but the recipe had an error—it calls for 2 tbsp salt total in the lust of ingredients, which I did not see, but then two different steps tell you to add 1 1/2 tbsp salt, so I followed those and it ended up way too salty. We’re planning to add some more yogurt and cucumber to cut the salt in order to eat the rest of it.
The lahmajoun topping in progress
Lahmajoun out of the oven
Spinach boregs in progress
The Boregs
Ja’Jik in progress
Finished Ja’jik
Yalanchi
Itch
The complete plate for Armenia night!
