ANOUSH’S PLACE
By Patrice Stewart
DAILY Staff Writer
The Decatur Daily, AL
March 8 2006
Anoush Place regularly cooks foods from her native Armenia for her
husband and children, but now she has a new goal.
Her dad, who has cancer, is visiting from her homeland, “so I’m trying
to cook healthy dishes for him,” she said.
Her kitchen is filled with “green stuff,” vegetables and grains,
as she makes her own version of veggie burgers to serve with her
special potato salad. Lentils star in her soup.
“I’ve always tried to make healthy food, but now it’s more important
than ever,” said Place. In addition to preparing food for her dad,
Shavarsh Hovhannisyan, who turned 72 Sunday, she sometimes cooks for
her mother-in-law, Marge Place of Decatur, who also is battling cancer
and likes her pieroski.
Have you cooked any buckwheat lately? It’s practically a staple around
this Decatur home. “My youngest, 8-year-old Karen, loves buckwheat
and begs for it as a snack,” Place said, and while it’s no substitute
for potato chips, 10-year-old Mary will eat it, too.
It’s cooked similarly to rice or pasta, and Place adds a tomato-based
sauce with meat on the side.
“Buckwheat is good for diabetics, those trying to lose weight, and
people with heart, colon and digestive system problems,” Place said.
In her home country, you needed a doctor’s prescription for buckwheat,
because of a shortage, she said, and it’s not easy to find in Decatur,
either. She buys bags of buckwheat at Gloria’s Good Health, while
Garden Cove Produce in Huntsville carries it, too.
“The first time you eat buckwheat, it doesn’t seem so special, but
that’s why I add the sauce,” Place said. When she’s in a hurry, she
uses Ragu and adds beef or other meat cooked with onion. Some like
buckwheat in a bowl with milk or butter.
To cook buckwheat, she puts 1 cup buckwheat and 2½ cups water in a
pan and lets it boil for about 5 minutes and then puts it on low heat
for another 5-10 minutes. Then she turns off the heat. Like rice,
it will be ready in 10 minutes, and you can add margarine or salt.
Her homemade “veggie burgers” are a mixture of chopped greens: spinach,
parsley and cilantro. You can add green onions.
She uses one bunch of parsley, one bunch of cilantro and half a plastic
bag of salad spinach leaves (chopped frozen spinach, drained, works,
too). She beats together two eggs, about 5 tablespoons all-purpose
flour, a bit of salt to taste and some milk. Then she mixes it with
the greens in a bowl and cooks it in a skillet in olive oil in one
large piece, which she cuts into smaller portions for serving.
Uneaten portions can be chilled for later. “Sometimes at night, when
we want something to eat but not too heavy a snack, I pull my veggie
burgers out of the refrigerator,” Place said.
While Mexicans use cilantro and Europeans add parsley, she said,
“Armenians use parsley and cilantro in everything.”
Lentil soup
“Lentils have a bunch of protein,” said Place. “People use beans,
but they don’t know about these lentils.” She said they are often used
in Greek-style cooking, and there are many similarities in Greek and
Armenian foods.
Dried lentils can be found in grocery stores and take longer to cook
than rice, she said. To her lentil soup, she also adds cubed cooked
potatoes. She fries a bit of onion with tomatoes or tomato sauce and
adds bits of red bell pepper to her lentil soup, which can be made
with beef or lamb. Over the top of the soup, she sprinkles a bit of
parsley and cilantro.
For her soups and sauces, she buys tomatoes at the Decatur farmer’s
market in the summer and cans them for later use. “You don’t have to
put tomato in lentil soup, but it gives it a good flavor,” she said,
as well as more nutrients.
Potato salad
Her Armenian-style potato salad is quick, easy and healthy. She cooks
and cubes potatoes and then adds onion, parsley, cilantro, salt,
pepper and olive oil for mixing. “It doesn’t have all that mayonnaise
or sour cream like American-style potato salad,” she said.
With her food, she likes to serve thin slices of lavash bread. Since
that requires a special oven to make correctly, her husband, Tom,
usually pick it up at Nabeel’s Cafe & Market (which has Greek,
Mediterranean and Italian foods) when he’s in Birmingham on business,
and she keeps it in the freezer. “My girls like it spread with cream
cheese as an after-school snack,” she said.
“My daddy loves dolmar, too – that’s his favorite food,” she said,
referring to grape leaves stuffed with a mixture of cabbage and
vegetables.
He likes all kinds of soups, too, so she’s prepared them during
the months he was undergoing chemotherapy treatments for colorectal
cancer. “I wanted to cook things he could digest that are good for him,
too,” she said.
“The doctors and others at Decatur General have been wonderful to him,
and everybody calls him Papa,” said Place.
While waiting at the oncology center, she got to thinking when she
saw many people bringing burgers and other fast food in to feed
family members.
“Food won’t heal you, but it will help your body fight against cancer,”
she said.
With her meals, she serves cool tea made with rosehips (crushed dried
berries brought from Armenia) and small cups of finely ground, pungent
Armenian coffee. Back home, that coffee might be cooked slowly in
hot sand, but here it’s made espresso-style and served with Pirouette
chocolate hazelnut cream-filled wafer sticks for a simple dessert.
“I miss my foods I can’t get here,” said Place. Some items are
available at an Armenian store in Los Angeles, so when friends came
to visit, they brought her two suitcases filled with buckwheat,
coffee and sweets.
food/060308/healthy.shtml
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