Flutterby™! : Armenian food

This last weekend we were out in the Central Valley dealing with some stuff for Alan, Charlene's developmentally disabled brother, and knowing that we were near to an Armenian community, I got a hankering for some thinly sliced basterma (beef cured with fenugreek and paprika) and string cheese with caraway seeds.

So we found a place called simply "Hye Deli" (At Bullard & Marks in Fresno), and got into a conversation with the woman (whose first language wasn't English) behind the counter. We got our basterma and string cheese, and then started looking around.

We picked up a couple of sticks of soujoukh (a sausage), assorted ingredients for middle eastern cooking that we haven't been able to find locally (but, alas, no pomegranite molasses), some roejik (sausage like rolls of walnuts in a grape mixture, I think thickened with a starch and possibly dipped), and, after agreeing that we couldn't bring home the frozen Armenian ravioli like things, talked to the proprietress a bit more.

She told us that it was very simple, you mix the seven spice mix with some beef, put it in the dough, bake them to brown them, and then simmer them in a watery chicken and tomato broth. We asked "what spices are in the 7 spice mix?".

She said "all of them."

So we got ourselves a tub of the seven spice mix. It appears to be black pepper, cloves, cinnamon, anise, nutmeg, chili pepper, and cumin, and at two tablespoons and a cut up onion for 3/4 lb of turkey meat and two eggs, cooked as meatballs, is a little strong, but damned tasty.

There's another ramble in here about loss of the old ways and homogenization of cultures, but that'll keep for another day.