Armenia unit study

I have to admit, the only information I knew about Armenia prior to this Armenia unit study was from my Holocaust and genocide advanced history class in college. That’s probably not what you want to teach your younger kids, so I did a bit of digging for this geography lesson, and while I still didn’t find much, I did find enough to make a short Armenia unit study.

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Armenia links and videos I found for our Armenia unit study

25 Amazing facts about Armenia

And that’s it, unless you want me to link to a zillion links about learning Armenian or just generic Wikipedia pages.

Or the Armenian genocide. But, I’m guess if you’re trying to cover this with your entire family, you’re not necessarily covering the news of the death of over a million people.

So there’s just one link, but I did find some useful Armenia videos

Geography Now: Armenia (which apparently can no longer be embedded, weird)

This is always a fun way to get some geography, now to some bits of history and if you have older kids let’s get into some controversy.

and now for the controversy…. 

Armenian recipe

 My favorite part of every recipe is finding a recipe, and while I was searching up recipes for our Armenia unit study I found A LOT of desserts, but all of the desserts were on a blog that did not give particularly good directions, or I didn’t think I had the skills to make it.

So, I came up with a compromise. I found several references to something that was similar to a pizza, and Food Network had an Armenian pizza recipe. Which would work perfectly with the one recipe I found on the 25 fascinating facts, for Lavash, Armenian flatbread.

So, I’m substituting out the tortillas in the Armenian pizza recipe for the Armenian flatbread. YUM!

Only it wasn’t so yum.

Armenian Flatbread

• 3 cups flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup warm water

1. Are you ready, this is super complicated? Measure out the flour and salt. I mixed it together, to disperse the salt throughout the flour, and then added the water and mixed it for a good several minutes until the dough is smooth.
2. Cover the dough and let it rest for 30 minutes.
3. Divide the dough into however many pieces you need and roll it out to make your flatbread.
4. Now if you were just making this as a flatbread, put it in the oven at 500 degrees for 4-5 minutes. But, we’re making it as part of a pizza…

Armenian Pizza

• 2 garlic cloves
• 1 medium onion chopped
• 1 green bell pepper seeded and chopped
• 1 pound ground beef
• 1 6 ounce can tomato paste
• 1 14.5 ounce can diced tomatoes
• 1/4 cup parsley
• 1/2 teaspoon cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenned

Do you notice what is not on this list? Cheese, and because I knew my family would hate it without cheese, I made two different versions. One without cheese to try the intended flavor, and one with cheese to make everyone happy, which still didn’t work.

But, let’s make this recipe.

1. Put all of those different ingredients (but the ground beef) into the food processor and puree them.
2. Then realize it never said if the ground beef should be cooked, and reread the instructions a few times and decide for the intended meal you should pre-cook the ground beef. So quickly brown the ground beef, then add it to the giant ingredient puree and chop it up a bit more.
3. Bake at 400 for 10 minutes.

Armenia Flatbread

Print

Armenia flatbread pizza for cooking around the world.

Prep Time 40 minutes

Cook Time 10 minutes

Total Time 50 minutes

Ingredients

• Flatbread dough:
• 3 cups flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup warm water
• Pizza topping:
• 2 garlic cloves
• 1 medium onion chopped
• 1 green bell pepper seeded and chopped
• 1 pound cooked ground beef
• 1 6 ounce can tomato paste
• 1 14.5 ounce can diced tomatoes
• 1/4 parsley
• 1/2 teaspoon cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Instructions

1. Mix together the flour and salt. Then add the water and mix it together until the dough is smooth and not sticky. Cover the dough and set aside to rest for 30 minutes.
2. Puree together the remaining ingredients except the ground beef in your food processor until it forms a consistency like hummus.
3. Add in the ground beef and puree it briefly again to mix it all together.
4. Divide the dough into several pieces and roll them out into a thin rectangle or circle, and transfer to a pizza stone.
5. Spread the topping thinly over the dough.
6. Cook in the oven at 400 degrees for 10 minutes.

Armenia notebooking pages

Grab my Europe notebooking pages and start filling it out.

All right, I had three books that were actually worth reading, and so that meant we had three mini-books to add-in (which you can find on the subscriber page, join my email list):

• Greedy Sparrow– a traditional Armenian tale, with a greedy sparrow gradually stealing bigger and bigger items
• Hotot- an Armenian “monster”
• Turkey- it’s been over 2 years since I researched this and I’m really struggling to remember why I included a turkey, national bird maybe?

More great fun lessons

• Ancient Greece lessons
• Europe Unit
• 9th Grade books made into movies

“Sanahin, Armenia” by Dumphasizer is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0