Stuffed grape leaves, called dolmades if you're greek, Sarma or Dolma if you're middle eastern.
This recipe is for the meat stuffed grape leaves, you can always leave the meat out but I personally like them with meat.
This was technically my first time making these babies and I must say, they came out amazing.
You will need:
1 Jar of Grape leaves
l lb of Ground Beef
1 cup of medium grain rice or basmati
2 Medium finely diced onions
2 Tbs of Crushed Garlic
1 tsp of 7 spices or all spice.
Juice of 1 lemon
1 tsp of salt
1 tsp of pepper
You will need to soak the grape leaves in water for an hour or so. So I recommend doing this before you begin.
Rinse the rice.
Chop the onions nice and fine, no one like lumpy onions in their dolmades.
Crush your garlic nice and fine as well for the same reason.
Saute onions in a pan with some olive oil.
Mix spices, onion, 1 Tbs of garlic, rice and ground beef in a bowl.
In another bowl mix 4oz of tomato paste with 2 Cups of Water, lemon juice and one tablespoon of garlic.
take drained grape leaves and layer them flat on the bottom of the pan
then take meat mixture and begin filling each leaf (instructions in pictures)
make sure the stem is removed.
once you are done rolling all the leaves
throw in the tomato paste mixture.
Make sure the liquid covers all the rolls. If not you add some more water.
place a heavy plate upside down over the rolls.
While they're cooking.
Take 2 Cups of Yogurt and mix in some crushed garlic. (your choice on how much)
Then serve the yogurt mixture on top of the stuffed grape leaves.
bring to boil and cook then lower heat to simmer 60-90 minutes.!
