Dolmas

Every time my girls and I go to the Strip District in Pittsburgh, we stop at Labad's Middle Eastern Grocery. Here we find all sorts of yummy ingredients. For my daughter Zoë, this is the place to stock up on grape leaves. You can also find some somewhat-fresh stuffed grape leaves at our local grocery, but I have been wanting to give my Grandma Harvey's recipe a try. Actually, she had two recipes - one with rice and one without. One of her recipes is only a list of ingredients, and the other has some instructions. So I mushed them together a bit and made this from the combination of both.

Dolmas
1 jar of grape leaves, rinsed
1/2 pound ground lamb
1/2 cup grated carrots
1/2 cup uncooked long grain rice
3 tablespoons tomato paste
1 tablespoon parsley
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
fresh ground black pepper
juice of two lemons
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Remove grape leaves from jar and rinse. Place them in a pot of boiling water for one minute, and then remove and put in cold water. When they have cooled, drain the water. Combine meat with carrots, rice, tomato paste, and seasonings. When ready to roll, place one teaspoon of the meat mixture on the back of one grape leaf and roll tightly. When the meat is gone and all leaves are rolled, place the remaining whole and broken leaves at the bottom of a heavy pot. Layer the stuffed grape leaves in snugly in the pot, making two or three layers as needed. Place a heatproof dish on top of the leaves to hold them down and then pour water in the pot to just cover the dish. Bake in the oven at 350 F for one hour. When cooled, drizzle leaves with lemon juice and olive oil. Serve warm or cold.

Baked Kibbee

I have been searching for a good kibbee recipe for a while. I lie. Actually I would prefer to have a plane ticket to the Levant to try a homemade version made with love by a random grandma. Sigh. And so I perused cookbook after cookbook looking for a recipe that would be easy enough for a novice like me to do, and tasty enough to make me feel like I was relaxing by the Eastern Mediterranean. Lo and behold I found a recipe in my Grandma's collection. Was Grandma Harvey secretly wishing to travel the world too? Maybe! Perhaps this is the source of my wanderlust!

This makes a huge batch of kibbee - a full 9x14 pan. Next time, I am planning on dividing the recipe by half and hopefully getting something around 9x9.


Baked Kibbee
2 cups #1 fine bulgur
2 large sweet onions, chopped
1 1/2 sticks butter
1/4 pound pine nuts
2 1/2 pounds ground lamb (or mixture of ground lamb and beef)
fresh ground pepper
kosher salt
pinch mint leaves
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 cup corn oil


Preheat oven to 350. In a large bowl, cover bulgur wheat with hot water and soak for about 15-20 minutes. While bulgur is soaking, saute onions with one stick of butter in a skillet until onions are soft. Remove onions and set aside. In same skillet, brown pine nuts until golden brown and set aside with onions. Brown 1/2 pound of the ground lamb until cooked through, and then add to the onion and pine nut mixture. This is your filling. Season with salt and pepper and allow filling to cool slightly.

In a large bowl, combine remaining meat and bulgur wheat. Using hands, mix to combine. You can also run through a food processor using ice water to keep the meat-wheat mixture cold. Add salt, pepper mint and ground cloves to the mixture. Knead well until all of the seasonings are incorporated into the mixture.

Butter a large pan (13 x 9 or larger) with generous amount of softened butter. Divide the meat/wheat mixture in half, and cover the bottom of the pan with one portion of the meat - adding in small patties and pressing together to a 1/2 inch thick solid layer. Smooth the surface with hands dipped in cold water. Add filling layer and spread evenly. Take the remaining half of the meat/wheat mixture and cover the filling, using small patties of meat until the entire surface is covered in a 1/2 inch layer. Smooth and press together using hands dipped in cold water.

Using a sharp knife, cut around the sides of the pan, and then cut the kibbee into diamond shapes about 1 1/2 inches wide. Take your finger (dipped in cold water) and poke in the center of each diamond. Pour evenly with corn oil over the top of the meat and let the oil soak into the divisions. Bake for about 1 hour. Let cool for 5 or 10 minutes and remove from the pan and serve. Drizzle the hole with extra virgin olive oil and serve with pita bread and a salad of fresh cucumbers and yogurt. It's also delicious served cold the next day.