Gay owned and run accommodation,lodgings,bed and breakfast hotel
Hersonissos Crete Greece
Hello you wonderful people out there! HWMBO has finally relented and let me have a bit of a say on the web site, now as you can imagine as a dog, I am not one for a lot of fussing about with food, but if all he is going to let me do is the recipe then I will have to make do, for the time being anyway!
HWMBO has told me that I should give typical Cretan recipes using healthy ingredients with not too much meat (I’m very much a meat girl myself and really look forward to getting a nice piece of pork on Sunday), so I will be giving you some wholesome Cretan foods which will help you keep you tails wagging, your teeth nice and white, and your winter coats thick and shiny, and do wonders for your cholestorel levels.
For my first recipe I have chosen “Lachanodolmathes” that’s stuffed cabbage leaves to those of you that don’t have the Greek like me (I am multilingual so I can smell a lamb chop in any language). Now this is the winter version of stuffed vine leaves, we use cabbage leaves instead because during the winter there are no vine leaves, and maybe you cannot get them where you live anyway!
Ralfa’s Racipe of the Week
Ingredients
1 large cabbage not the sort with curly leaves, more like the type you use for coleslaw.
500gms of rice (call it 1 pound)
4 grated tomatoes
1 cup olive oil
3 grated onions
salt and pepper
Parsley, mint, and fennel all finely chopped
Method.
Remove whole leaves from the cabbage, you can do this without breaking them if you cut the core out first and,using a large saucepan, blanch them for about 5 minutes. They do not need to sit in the water, just steaming them is enough, as you need them to be flexible. Remove them from the pan and then cut into two down the central stem, removing the hard centre stem so that you have two flexible halves.
Mix all the ingredients for the stuffing together. Put a spoonful of the mixture at the bottom centre of each leaf and then roll it up, folding the sides up as you go so the stuffing does not fall out.
To cook, put a generous two tablespoons of olive oil into your big pan, chop up the smaller heart leaves of the cabbage and put them into the pot, arrange your neat little dolmathes on top and then pour over enough water to cover and add the rest of the olive oil and simmer until the water is absorbed, about 20 minutes. Shake the pan occasionally to stop the bottom leaves sticking.
There that was easy wasn’t it?
Variations.
If you are not too fond of fennel and its aniseedy taste use some dill instead, a little dash of cumin also adds a bit of flavour, as does a bit of powdered garlic added to the stuffing.
These will freeze quite well if you take them out of the pan a few minutes before they are cooked, defrosting them in the microwave will then complete the cooking process.
