Tomatoes and More Armenian Attempts

All recipes I've ever seen tell you to peel tomatoes by scoring the skin then blanching and shocking them. I, however, hate scoring the tomatoes because my knife is never sharp enough (no matter how sharp it is) to score the tomato skin properly and I end up cutting a huge gash in the bottom and losing half the tomato in the boiling water. So today I decided just to boil the tomatoes without scoring them. It worked perfectly. I boiled them for about a minute still on their stem and everything, then dunked them in cold water and they peeled MORE easily, and stayed in one piece. Beautiful.


This is a stuffed zucchini recipe from the Armenian cookbook I previously mentioned. Carving out the middle of the zucchini proved to be a lot harder than I anticipated, but by half number 8, I was getting a system down. The filling is ground lamb, finely chopped onion, parsley, salt and cayenne pepper. First they are fried on the stovetop:

And then you dump tomatoes over them and cook them in the oven at 350 for 45 minutes. The best part was the tomatoes. They dried out a bit and became super intense (kind of like sun dried tomatoes). I accidentally spilled a bunch of cayenne into the filling, so they were pretty spicy. Good.

With the unused part of the zucchini, I made these pancakes. They are zucchini, onion, egg, flour, cumin, mint, and parsley mixed up and fried in olive oil. So far I've learned that Armenian food requires a lot of chopping.