Armenian Rice Pilaf
Very simple but delicious rice dish. You can add currants or nuts to make it fancy. If using canned chicken broth, use one can plus water to make the two cups.
Armenian Pilaf
This is a recipe that I have been making since I was a teenager. My Step-Father was Armenian, and we ate this pilaf often, with our evening meal. It has a great buttery flavor, and can be made with either brown rice or long grain, white rice. It’s YUMMY either way. I learned to make it with just butter. However, using a combination of oil and butter, helps to keep smoking and burning to a minimum, while still imparting the great buttery taste. I have also made it with just olive oil, and also with a combination of butter and olive oil. Of course, the flavor is slightly different. I think it has the best flavor, when made with just 3 Tbsp of butter (no oil), but it is healthier with the butter/oil combination, and healthiest with 2 Tbsp oil and no butter.
Auntie’s Armenian Rice Pilaf
Being of Armenian descent, I was raised on foods from that region of the world, and pilaf was one on which the children in my family cut their teeth. I never even knew rice was white until I was 17 years old as we always ate pilaf. My brothers and I had no grandmother to teach us, but we did have our great-aunt, our grandfather’s sister, who filled that role, and passed-down the recipes from our ancestors to us, and now I prepare them for my own children. This pilaf recipe is it: just pilaf. Nothing fancy, no mushrooms, nor shallots or onions or pine nuts. It was our staple. We ate it with stroganoffs poured over the top, with grilled burgers on Saturday afternoons in the long, hot Summers in Long Island and then Southern California, with my mother’s wonderful roasts on Sunday nights. It was the perfect side with Shish Kebob on Christmas day, and alongside our Thanksgiving turkey. This is the recipe for pilaf as Auntie taught us.
Armenian Rice and Noodles
My daughters call this “Noodle Rice” and we have some variation on it several times a month. I’ve used broken spaghetti, vermicelli, and orzo in place of the egg noodles (choose eggless pasta to be totally vegan…well, duh, you knew that!) I also usually throw in a handful of golden raisins with it and up the water just a bit to account for plumping them up – the kids eat those first! Be creative…substitute a little lemon juice for part of the water if it’s going with fish, etc. A nice, reliable add-on to dinner, originally from “Betty Crocker’s New Int’l Cookbook.”
Armenian Rice Pilaf
From a dear Armenian friend. I have made this for 25 years. It is so easy and always comes out perfect. This to me is the true pilaf.
