Food, and its Meaning

In Armenia many things take on different meanings.  I could probably make a profound list, paying attention to the prosody and sentence length, trying to find some cute alliteration, but I want to go to bed.  The few people who would get the meaning aren't who this blog is for so most of the force of the statement would be lost.

Living in Armenia I've come realize that food, what I eat here, how I eat and prepare it, and when I eat it, has very different connotations

So let's talk about food.  There are many ingredients that are hard to come by, or are impossible to find.  We are supplied with a wonderful cookbook that takes those things into account, listing simple recipes that can be made with ingredients found in Armenia, substitutes, and whether you'll need ingredients from the US or ingredients found only in the capital city, Yerevan.

One such recipe is called Hoppel Poppel.  Basically German leftovers for breakfast.  Something like an omelet with potatoes and onions.  But we decided the first time to bake it instead of just frying it on the stove top and it has become a cult favorite among my friends and me in Vanadzor.  It's really easy to make.

Hoppel Poppel with cheese melted on top

Part of the fun is just the name which is great fun to say.  And it's easy to make, you can literally take any leftovers you've had the night before and throw it in with some eggs and you got yourself a hoppel poppel.  I've made it with leftover fajita chicken, ratatouille, and we've also made on in a bundt pan, which is affectionately called The Bundter.

The other day I was amazed when I saw this:

Canned, diced tomatoes!

You don't find this in Vanadzor.  We can get tomato paste, jarred, whole tomatoes in tomato juice.  But diced tomatoes!?

There's a reason they called Vanadzor the Great Valley.  Actually they don't, but I've watched the Land Before Time twice in the last month, and I thought that a fitting name for my city in a valley.

Then I saw canned beans.  Something else I haven't seen in my two years here in Armenia.  I made rice, bean, and salsa burritos for my sitemates, and all the while I was raving about the canned ingredients I had.  Taste those beans!  I made this meal with no preparation!  Those beans!  Those tomatoes (The subtext being, 'in winter!')

And we talked about how, in the US, the complete opposite would be raved about.  Fresh tomato salsa.  Dried beans, soaked and prepared from scratch.  But here I was, raving about the canned, and otherwise, not-fresh nature of my ingredients.  Soaking beans isn't hard to do, but it requires forethought half a day or a day in advance.  That kind of thinking about what I'm going to eat doesn't come easily, so having canned beans as an option is wonderful.  Tomatoes in winter are an expensive luxury, if they are available at all.  Tomatoes are a summer food.

In the US it's fashionable to eat in-season, or locally (until they find out coffee isn't grown locally, then they make a big exception for that), but in Armenia it's just reality for a large part of our diet.

I have come to appreciate many fruits and vegetables a great deal more.  I was so sick of tomatoes my first 4 months here, but once May rolled around and I could count on one hand the amount of fresh tomatoes I'd had since October I could have been eating caviar, for as happy as I was.  And those first tomatoes weren't even ripe yet.  Didn't matter.

After the Epic Canned Burrito Ingredient Feast I went back to the store the next day and saw that all the canned tomatoes were gone.  I asked the store clerks and they confirmed that every last one had been purchased, and, no, they didn't know when they'd be back.

And despite living in the big city, I'm still able to get fresh milk from the store below my apartment complex.

Unpasteurized, milked the same morning.

I was taking back my homemade yogurt container (re-used glass containers) and the shopkeeper jumped at the chance to give me some milk straight from a nearby village.  She had it in a bucket and was using a tea cup to fill up my container.  I made mac and cheese with it.