I was invited to my friend Asmahan’s for dinner the other night, and she made these amazing stuffed grape leaves. I called her today for the recipe, she was kind enough to share it with me, now I’m sharing with you. I have posted sarma/dolma recipes before but they are Turkish or Albanian style. This is the Lebanese style of making them.
I have had Lebanese style grape leaves many times but I never had them like this, with the rice partly cooked before. My kids like sticky rice so they really enjoy these grape leaves. I find that it is easier to roll with the rice being sticky. I used jarred grape leaves for this, so the rice is an approximate amount. If you have leftovers you can stuff other veggies with it.
What you will need:
- 1 jar grape leaves, drained and boil for 5 minutes , drain and cool
- approx 2 cups calrose rice, partly boiled (and rinse to remove starchiness) this is to softened the rice and make it sticky (easy to roll with)
- 1 bunch of parsley rinsed and chopped
- 2-3 tbsp dried mint or 3/4 cup chopped fresh
- 1 chopped tomato
- 1 chopped onion
- 3 cloves of garlic finely chopped or grated
- 1/2 cup olive oil
- 1/2- 3/4 cup lemon juice
- 1-2 tomato sliced and put on bottom of pot
Mix rice and onion, parsley, tomato, garlic, mint season with salt.
Drizzle with a little olive oil.
Remove stems from leaves if needed, roll the leaves with filling. Lay sliced tomatoes on the bottom of pot.
Arrange the rolls in pot, pour over the lemon juice, olive oil and cover with water (season with a little salt) about enough to cover the rolls. Bring to a boil and cook covered with lid, cook on low-medium heat until rice is cooked takes about 35- 40 minutes. Let rest for at least 25 minutes before serving. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and serve with lemon wedges. Enjoy!
This looks great, I have been wanting to try out cooking middle eastern food, and now I am able to access to all ingredients, except I dont know about this rice that your using … can we use any sort of rice, such as long grain basmati rice, as a first hand experiment I dont want to but a big bag of rice and have it sit around after….