Rolling Grape Leaves

Finally Grape Leaf day came. It was just in time. Yesterday had been a bad high tech day with my wife’s laptop breaking down, and messing up of the stenciling on a number of T-Shirts amidst other things. Yesterday we were in a hurry and everything seemed to go wrong. So we needed the slow food day of stuffing Grape Leaves. My wife and I rolled about 215 of the 600 or so grape leaves we had picked from the vines on the fence in the backyard or in the park and on the bike path nearby. If you look at the recipe, you can see that mint is a key ingredient. The mint is Uncle Bob’s Mint, from the mint we grow in the garden, dry, crush and bottle. The salad to go with the grape leaves was completely from the garden. The pita bread and Laba (Middle East Yogurt) were from “my friend” Middle Eastern store in Milwaukee. Only the rice, meat, lemons and one of the spices were from the regular grocery store. Authentic Grape Leaves use hand-ground lamb meat originally, but now, with the price of lamb so high, we make them with ground chuck.

When I went to purchase the bread and yogurt “my friend” at the store asked me how many people we were inviting over. Usually we do invite friends and neighbors but today decided to have some ourselves tonight and to bring the rest to our son and his family up north next weekend. My grandchildren helped picked some of the Grape Leaves and are official members of the “Graf Grape Leaf” club. Last year we had the Graf family gathering of all Grafs at my brother’s house in Denver to share the Grape Leaves. I am not sure when we will all get together again next but we still have a good bounty of Grape Leaves in the freezer. As eldest in the family I feel it is important to keep the sharing of grape leaves tradition alive. I am not sure we can, but at least we were rolling Grape Leaves today.

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