Sunday, March 01, 2009

I'm afraid I shall be a tease here


And that is because though I had the camera handy and started taking photos as I prepped food, I did not pause to take photos of the finished products before we partook.

So, yesterday was a nice Armenian meal for some of my friends. Above you can see slices of eggplant salted to draw their moisture out. That was the first stage toward the moussaka. Greek style calls for a custard on the top of moussaka but all the Armenians I know just pour tomato sauce over the top and that is what I did, as my mother learned from neighbor Gladys.

I also made sou boereg, a dish of phyllo dough with a filling of Muenster cheese, eggs, and parsley. Here are the bowl scrapings of the filling.



And this is the soe boereg before it went into the oven.


Next up: dessert.

I cheated a bit on the bourma, not shaping it the way you are supposed to and in the syrup I added the zest of an entire lemon, so it was quite tangy.

Here you can see I was chopping nuts on my pastry marble.


The nuts were combined with cinnamon and sugar to make the filling for the pastry.


And here is the finished dessert: phyllo dough, walnuts, cinnamon, sugar, and a lemony syrup.


For appetizers we had regular and red pepper hummus with triangles of pita bread and strips of red pepper for dipping and a medley of olives.

The main course had the moussaka, sou boereg, bulghur pilaf flavored with fresh mint, and asparagus.

We accompanied this with Rockpile Reserve Syrah from Rosenblum Winery, compliments of my buddy Steve. (Thanks, Steve. It was lovely!)

We then headed off to the Vortex Theatre for Antigone, nicely done.

And that's what I did this weekend. (Today I went to church and plan to take it easy. Need to catch my breath. Some Russian, some laundry, lots of rest.)

--the BB

3 comments:

Padre Mickey said...

Geez, all this Armenian food, you must be from Fresno!

Paul said...

A Fresno native, indeed, Padrecito, and I dare say, an honorary Hye.

Yes odarmen em payts keechma hayeren khosil g'rnam.

Jane R said...

*drooling*