After a long hard week of sickness and family drama, I woke up early on a Sunday to make Yalanchi with my fellow dandeegeens Malvina and Vicky. We all are participating in lent this year and decided it would be fun to cook something together. Yalanchi, dolma, dolamedes, sarma, whatever you want to call it, it's delicious.
The recipe we used is my mother's which I am going to guess was her mother's and so on.
1 jar of grape leaves (preferably Orlando, Yergat seems to not be available anymore.
1 coffee mug of rice (about 1 and a 1/2 or 2 cups) [our mug of choice was once a Shushi Dance Ensemble mug]
1 coffee mug of olive oil
1 bunch of parsley chopped
A few springs of mint chopped
The first task is to get the leaves ready. Rinse each leaf of brine and dry them. Cut the stems off. Save the big leaves aside to line the pot. As I washed the leaves, Malvina dried them and cut the stems. We thought we had a lot of leaves, but ended up buying another small jar.
While we did that Vicky cut the onions. The recipe calls for 10 but some of them were small so we used 12. We cried and laughed, and most importantly listened to iTunes Radio 90's Pop Gold. The onions need to be small, so if you're not using a food processor you have to cook the onions for a bit to mersunel them (kill them, but really soften them).
Mix the onions, rice, olive oil, dill, parsley, salt and pepper in a bowl, now your filling is done. Next you have to stuff the leaves. You need to make sure the leave is vein side up. Place some filling in the bottom of the leaf wrap the bottom up and the fold over the sides, then you have to roll it up and keep tucking in the sides. The olive oil acts as a glue, but when you place it in the pot, put it open side down. Our first few were a disaster, but with time we got better.
After you've finished the filling or the leaves you're ready to cook! Add half a mug of water and place a china plate on top. The plate helps to steam the dolma. The dolma should cook on medium high until it starts boiling at a high rate. Then lower it medium low. The total cook time should be about an hour and a half. Ours didn't work out as well, our rice was cooked, but our onions were a little crunchy. I called a reinforcement (my mother) who said just to let it cook more, the onions this time of year aren't great, also we might not have let it get hot enough before. She called again later to check our progress.
The best part was eating the dolmas hot out of the pot to check if they were cooked. So yummy. Even the ones on the bottom that burned.
All our families enjoyed the dolma. Our common criticism was the leaves were too thick. But we got the flavoring right. My dad gave me an 8 out of 10, 10 being dolma by my aunt Arpi.
What a yummy way to start my week.
