Spring Time Dolma Picnic

Over the Victoria Day long weekend the family and I enjoyed a delicious spring time Dolma feast, we had a mixed tray of stuffed vegetables of onion, peppers, eggplant and zucchini made by my mother, a gluten free version using Quinoa for my sister and I contributed the lemony stuffed grape leaves, my youngest sister made salad too and we had a wonderful feast!

Here at AdventuressHeart we've covered Dolma, Mahshi and stuffed vegetables a lot over the last couple of years, here's a roundup of the recipes, enjoy! :)

Mahshi Stuffed Vegetables 

Stuffing and Rolling Dolma 

Minty Dolma - stuffed Grape Leaves 

Cabbage Dolma 

Cabbage Dolma II 

Minty Dolma (stuffed grape leaves)

I love to make dolma, it is a favourite in our house... traditionally (in our kurdish culture) we make a big pot of assorted stuffed vegetables and include grape leaves. The rice stuffing also has meat, spices (just for flavour, not heat) and tomato paste but now since I'm begun making this simplified version with only garlic, fresh mint and olive oil ... and lemon juice of course.

It's a very simple and basic recipe and everyone loves it because it is an easy snack food and tastes great straight out of the fridge too.

I made a large pot here, using 1 and a 1/3 jar of leaves and close to 4 cups of rice, a big bunch of fresh mint and lots of garlic cloves. ... unfortunately I didn't have olive oil on hand this time so I opted for butter (melted it and mixed it with the rice) it had a nice flavour!

For the complete recipe you can refer to my other dolma posts here and here ... also here !

Normally the leaves are rather medium sized but this time I had almost a full jar of very large leaves which resulted in some super long dolmas if I didn't split the leaves. My mother tends to divide the leaves and make smaller ones but this time I thought I'd make thinner longer ones and it turned out quite nice, like a cigar, hehe.

Cabbage Dolma

Making cabbage dolma (Iraqi style!)

Forgot to add the minced meat (Ground beef) in the rice mixture. But oh well, vegetarian is always good! Included is a photo-sequence on how to seperate the onion layers and stuff them. Remember not to fill with too much stuffing as the rice expands and fills out the onion nicely. Laying them loosely is fine and letting them "burn" or brown a bit on the bottom of the pot is always the best part.

Yum! Credit: Thanks to my lovely talented sister S for taking the pictures.

Stuffing and rolling dolma