One very important method of food preservation that's practiced here (and I shamefully forgot to mention in my last post) is dried fruit, called "chir". "Chir" shares a stem with the Armenian word "chor", which means "dry". All over town, you see plates of fruit left out to dry on any available surface.
Having tasted some of Alla's chir, I can tell you it's amazing! The best is this really fantastic lemon-flavored one where she shreds apples into a pot and then adds shredded lemon and a bunch of sugar. The whole things is boiled until it's about the consistency of oatmeal, then scooped into little hashbrown like globs, and put out to dry.
The air is so hot and dry here, that you can just leave the fruit out in the sun and it dries to the consistency of fruit leather all on it's own. If we tried to do that back in New England, all we'd get for our trouble would be a bunch of moldy fruit. Here, all you have to look out for are the bees- I think they might love chir as much as I do.
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