Thursday, December 27, 2007

Post #53 - Stuffed Grape Leaves

I bought a jar of Reese grape leaves a while back on a whim, and they've been sitting in my cupboard ever since, waiting for inspiration to slap me in the back of the head.

Well, tonight, my head suffered a resounding slap after I cooked up the last of my Himalayan Red Rice.












I rinsed a leaf, then stuffed it with some of the rice mixed with feta, olive oil, salt and pepper, rolled the whole thing up like a mini burrito, then steamed it for about 30 minutes.















Picture from the evil jungle prince blog. Check out his other pictures from the post on dolmades - I'm jealous!

Not bad for a first try, next time I'm going to add either some lemon juice or some red wine vinegar to counteract the starchiness of the rice and the richness of the feta and olive oil. And I'll probably steam it longer, maybe another 20 minutes, or maybe boil them first, as suggested by this recipe from Spicetart, because the leaf was still a bit chewy.

And by the way, if you ever buy a jar of grape leaves, there's no way you can remove just one - they're all rolled up together, and the whole mass of them comes out at once!

3 comments:

SteamyKitchen said...

I've never tried making anything with grape leaves before!

I'll have to try soon.

p.s. to link a photo while creating a post, insert the photo, then click on the photo, then click on the link button. Paste your link.

Vicki said...

Thanks for the tip, Jaden. I had tried linking by hand-coding the HTML, which wasn't working. I should pay more attention to the pretty buttons.

Anonymous said...

We love stuffed grape leaves but have never attempting them. Having read your post I think we'll have to give them a 'whirl' in the future.