A classic Armenian dish, and one that you'll find yourself ordering if you're a vegetarian travelling in Armenia, especially outside the capital. Armenian cuisine has less variety for veggies than Georgian, perhaps because Armenia is, on the whole, more mountainous, even though Georgia has higher peaks. The weather is much more extreme across most of Armenia and the soil is often rocky and unsuited to agriculture, except in the fertile and low-lying Araks valley. But there's still enough veggie food to keep you interested. Wherever you are you'll be able to put together a selection of the type of dishes Armenians don't really take seriously as food, but which will in fact make a pleasant meal. This is one of those dishes.
This is not a difficult recipe at all. In fact, I would say it's one of the easier ones, and you're browsing a cookbook full of easy recipes. It does, however, take some time due to the process of straining the yoghurt....a good few hours at least and overnight if possible. You could buy some ready strained yoghurt, of course. Or or do the recipe in five minutes with unstrained yoghurt which will give you a perfectly acceptable and rather tasty side dish, but you'll miss out on the lovely creamy texture, but. So I have to say, if you have the time, give it a go. It will be good fun. You'll enjoy doing it, I promise. How often do you get to do something like this? Making a wee contraption out of empty jars, rubber bands and scraps of cloth? The last time you did anything like that was probably in primary school.
Here's how you do it, or here's how I did it - you may come up with a better method. Take a large empty jar and a piece of muslin, cheese-cloth or something of a similar loose-woven texture, of a size that will fold over to form a double layer and still be large enough to form a pocket inside your jar with enough of a margin to be secured around the edge with a rubber band. The bottom of the cloth should be around the middle of the jar, not much lower. There needs to be enough clearance for the liquid from the yoghurt to collect without the bag hanging in the liquid. Once you've set up your strainer, simply spoon in the yoghurt and stick the jar in the fridge. Check it after an hour and there will be room to add quite a bit more yoghurt.
The measurements really aren't important in this recipe. I've put the quantity of yoghurt as 'around five hundred grams'. That's because that's how much I used. At first, I thought I could only get three hundred grams into my cheese-cloth-and jam-jar straining set-up, but an hour later, after the liquid had strained out, I squeezed in another 150 grams or so - handy really, because yoghurt usually comes in 500 gram tubs. You see the value of testing out all the recipes before writing them up? I didn't know that was going to happen, but now I do, and I'm passing on my knowledge. But, of course, you might still use a different quantity. What you choose to do will depend on various factors, such as the capacity of your strainer, whether you like a lot of garlic or not, what kind of herbs you use and how many people you aim to feed. Whatever you do, though, afterwards you'll probably say to yourself, 'That was nice! Thanks for that, Ashy.'
The simplest way is to just mix everything into the strained yoghurt. But be gentle about it. You don't need to beat the mixture; just fold the chopped ingredients in so that they're evenly distributed. The alternative is to mix the salt and garlic into the yoghurt and sprinkle the nuts and herbs over the top. In Armenian restaurants, they often spoon dollops of yoghurt and garlic mixture onto whole salad leaves arranged neatly on a plate. When the nuts and dill are sprinkled over, it looks a very pretty dish indeed.
Try serving this dish with stuffed peppers or Georgian-style beans.