Hey Jan Ghapama!

 I continued with my Samhain rituals last night. Trick or Treating with my son was actually a bit fun, as I let myself forget about the war for a little bit and allowed my mind to fill with memories of Halloweens past. It is funny how memories lie dormant for the rest of the year but suddenly you’re thinking about things that happened while you were trick or treating back when you were ten years old. That was one of the things I looked forward to most when I found out I was having a kid; finally an excuse to go Trick or Treating again and not have it seem weird. So really, not even the coronavirus was able to defeat Halloween this year. Perhaps I was wrong, perhaps Halloween is stronger than I thought. 

When we got back though, it was dinner time. Time to make the traditional Armenian dish of the autumn, ghapama. I try to make it a yearly tradition to make ghapama (not necessarily on Halloween/Samhain but sometime in the autumn), and have kept it up since around 2013. Now here’s the part where I am going to briefly turn this into a cooking blog.

A few days prior my wife and I went to a pumpkin patch and picked out a nice small pumpkin. A white one, actually, which was unusual. But it seemed right. For ghapama you don’t really want to use an enormous pumpkin. I made that mistake one of the first times I tried to make it, and had trouble fitting it into the oven. No, you want one of about four pounds or so. I carved the top off making a sort of lid, just like you would do if you were making a jack o’lantern, and scraped out most of the seeds and pumpkin gunk. I left a few seeds in though, to be cooked with the rest of the dish. I then cooked a cup of rice in a pressure cooker, adding a cup of water and a quarter stick of butter for flavor. It came out nice and fluffy. If you want to be traditional you could use something like rice pilaf, but I didn’t have that. Next I mixed in some nuts and dried fruit, which I got as a bag of trail mix with pralines and almonds with dried cranberries and pineapple. Traditionally, raisins and dried apricots would be used, with walnuts, but again, I am in Florida and have to make do with what I can find at Aldi and Publix. Plus most of the apricots here are imported from Turkey. Ew. I am not buying genocide-flavored apricots. Anyway, I mixed in a good helping of honey, and sprinkled throughout it some pumpkin spice. Normally you would use cinnamon, but I didn’t have any. 

Here is how it looked. Not strictly traditional, but good enough for our purposes. Next, I put the lid back on top, and baked it in the oven at 325 degrees fahrenheit for about an hour and a half. When it was done, it looked like this:

Now whenever you make or eat ghapama, you also have to listen to the song “Hey Jan Ghapama”. You have to. Or else what is the point? Most people’s favorite is the Harout Pamboukjian version. 

This delightful little folk song will lift your spirits right up.  

At any rate, after eating my fill, I stuck the leftovers in the fridge. You can still eat it cold, although it won’t be quite as satisfying. But I’m not wasting food.

Later that night I lit the candles at my Samhain altar, and paid homage to the ancestors. I am hoping the energy I sent out will bring peace and victory to Armenia, and that the dead will rest in peace, knowing they are not forgotten.