I will admit to getting rather overexcited when new products appear on the island. Just the other day I was busted at Lyford Cay City Market squealing in front of a jar of sun-dried tomatoes. (This, coupled with my rather eccentric appearance – dragged through several hedges, not just backwards, but actively kicking and screaming, has not improved my cachet with the checkout ladies.)
The other day I found bottled vine leaves. Now, I don’t particularly like vine leaves. I wouldn’t order them in a Lebanese restaurant, even as a third wave of ordering if I still had room and wanted to go through the whole menu (fatayer are quite another matter). But finding them in a random supermarket in the Bahamas seems miraculous, as out of place as a jar of truffle chestnut honey would be in Lidl.
So obviously I had to buy them, and my new bestest-cookbook Ottolenghi: The Cookbook has just the recipe, stuffed with pinenuts, currants and rice. Now, they say that their recipe makes twenty – still quite a lot, but reasonable to get through in lunches and snacks for two people. Unfortunately, it makes more like forty and Mr. R&R refuses to go anywhere near them (they’re green on the outside, I should have known), so I am open to suggestions as to what to do with a towering plate of the little blighters, tasty though they are.
I didn’t change the recipe at all from the book, so I feel a bit bad reprinting it verbatim. Here are the illustrated steps however, from which you can glean the basic principle:
Firstly, make your filling of sautéed onion, rice, currants, pinenuts and spices. The rice doesn’t need to be cooked through at all, just impregnated with flavour and oil:
After soaking and drying the vine leaves, wrap them around a teaspoon of filling, not too much otherwise they’ll burst during cooking:
Line a saucepan with torn or imperfect leaves and pack in the rolls. Add a little water (not too much, just to about half-way up the rolls), oil and lemon juice and gently simmer for an hour with a saucer on top to stop them moving around:
Wonder whether they could be used as ecological alternative to sandbags in seawall construction:
7 Comments on "Stuffed vine leaves"
Great job with this dish. I would love to give this a go. Never worked with vine leaves. Thanks for sharing.
Um, have a drinks and nibbles party?
Use them as something to hide behind in a sniper shoot-out (good camo).
Throw them at recalcitrant people who won’t eat what you cook gratefully.
That’s it, that’s all I got.
Disappointing stocking fillers for disagreeable children?
Biodegradable alternative to Lego?
Interessante conoscere piatti appartenenti a diverse culture…che tipo di riso hai usato?
Come ti è sembrato il risultato finale?
CIAO
@zucchero La ricetta richiede il riso “pudding” a chicchi corti (molto comune in inghilterra per fare i nostri dolci al riso), pero’ ho usato il riso arborio che avevo gia’ in casa. Risultato finale: onestamente, tutto dipendera’ dalla qualita’ delle foglie, quelle alle Bahamas un po’ scarse… ripieno molto buono e saporito pero’.