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Passport & Plate - Lobahashu

Armenia | Tuesday, March 11, 2014 | 5 photos

Ingredients
red beans - 450gr
onion - 1 ea
garlic cloves - 3 ea
olive oil - 6tbs
chicken bouillon
salt - 2 pinches
rice - 50 g
mint, thymus, cilantro, dill, parsley, bay leaf, pepper.
1 egg
sour cream - 100g

 

How to prepare this recipe
Take around 450grams of red beans, clean and boil it in water until it becomes soft – usually takes nearly 30-50 minutes.

Pour out the water, chop 1 average onion and 2-3 cloves of garlic + add chopped vegetables to the beans with some olive oil and fry it in the pan.

Then add 1 liter of chicken bouillon and let the bean with vegetables boil, add a pinch of salt.

Take some rice, 50 grams, add some water, and give it 5 mins for starch to be removed. Then add rice into the mix. It is better to use Turkish rice, thin/flat and large.

Once the rice is ready, add dry mint, thymus, cilantro, dill, parsley, bay leaf, more salt and black pepper. Let it boil for 3-4 mins.

Take 1 egg and a bit of warm bouillon into the small cup and start mixing it, and little by little add into the soup. The result of egg should look like flakes. Let it boil for another 5 mins.

In the end, serve with lots of chopped parsley and dill.
Moreover, soup is served with sour cream mixed with garlic, salt and mint. Just add one tbs of sour cream into the soup and enjoy.

 

The story behind this recipe
My mother received this recipe from her grandmother, who was Armenian and in 1902 moved from Armenia to Turkmenistan. Two cuisines vary from each other very much. Turkmen people still have not got used to eating soups. The story about it is very hilarious. The reason why my great-grandmother has moved with her husband, my great-grandfather, is because of a glass of milk. It was common for big families in the past to live in a single house. While men were working on the field, wives were waiting for their husbands at home, doing chores. My great-grandmother, Aikanush, was pregnant with one of her 7 children at that time and craved for milk very much. However other daughter-in-law, who was a wife of an older brother was very bossy around the house and disliked her. She managed not to give a glass of milk to Aikanush and that was a boiling point for my great-grandfather Arsen, who took her side and left the house in search of new land and better life. That is why I was born in Turkmenistan, a Central Asia country.

You would ask what has it got to do with the recipe? The recipe of the bean soup belonged to Arsen’s mother, who used to be a teacher in local village church and kept notes of hers. She was the first woman in our family who started writing out different things. One of such were recipes of favourite meals of her husband. Because Aikanush was relatively new in the family and did not have time to learn how to cook all favourite meals, she managed to take the notes with here upon urgent leave from the house. So this is how my grandmas (her 7 daughters) learned the recipe. Now, it is my mother’s favourite soup. Not because of the story, which is very unusual, but because the soup is healthy and nutritious.