Stuffed grape leaves

Ariana Bauer is my guest cook today, and she shows you how to roll stuffed grape leaves....

These are made with grape leaves, which you can buy in most supermarkets. The filling is a mixture of ground meat and spices as here:

Ingredients::

1 medium onion
1 tablespoon of olive oil
2 pinches of good salt
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
1 teaspoon of nutmeg
1 teaspoon of allspice
1 and 1/4 cups of rice, washed and drained
1 pound of ground meat, in this case 86% ground beef

Cook the onions until they start to brown and get that wonderful smell with the olive oil.  Then turn off the heat and add that into the rice with the spices and salt and pepper.  Add the meat and mix by hand.

It is a fairly easy recipe, as shown by Ariana.

How common is chicken and dumplings?

A few days ago I was preparing a dish that most people don't know about.  It is a Lebanese dish called Mograbiah.  This recipe, from a large tome of Lebanese cooking, is a nice recipe involving chicken, vegetables, beef and most importantly, these large pearl couscous, made with semolina flour.  The original recipe wanted me to use whole chickens and boil in some water to cook them and essentially make a broth.  Then cook the other ingredients like the pearl onions, beef cubes and such and then add them all together with some mograbiah pearls to finish.  Like any good chef, I changed the recipe, and improvised.


I immediately noticed that it was a Lebanese version of chicken and dumplings.  Really.  These little balls, cook like pasta and are basically some water, fat of some sort, like butter or shortening and then semolina flour.  They swell up in water and get very tender like good cooked pasta.  Because they suck up moisture to get tender, they can absorb flavors as well and get tasty.  To make this dish, I cooked the chicken breasts in the oven and put them in a pot with 2 tablespoons of butter.  The mograbiah balls were cooked in boiling water and then I placed them into the pot with the chicken.  I then browned some beef cubes in oil in a pan and then added them into the pot.  I then browned some peeled and halved pearl onions in that residue from the beef and added some chicken stock to the pan to deglaze it.  Everything went into the large pot.  A little caraway seed was added with some freshly ground black lava Cyprus sea salt and some freshly ground pepper.  I filled the pot with enough store-bought chicken stock to cover everything, about 2 inches higher and let it come to a boil and simmer for about an hour.  What was finished reminded me of chicken and dumplings, with beef and onions, as the dumplings were essentially those smaller beads which had swelled up with delicious flavor.   


We all know that chicken and dumplings are made similarly.  I cook the chicken and add it into a pot where I add some chicken stock and butter, salt and pepper and start cooking.  In the same pot, as the stock starts to boil, I make some simple dumplings using Bisquick mix and milk and drop it into the pot in spoonfulls.  The dumplings cook and absorb the chicken flavor as well as thicken the soup.  Despite the lack of beef and the onions, it is amazing how similar the two dish taste.  Besides, one of them just likely happens to be a thousand years older than the other.  So, is our modern day, Southern-style chicken and dumplings a descendant of the Lebanese or Arabic dish as a whole?  Could be.

Why can't Americans do Lebanese?

I'm new into the Lebanese food thing.  My wife is 50% Lebanese, her dad is from Beirut and two years ago we went to Lebanon for Christmas and plans are being made to go there for this year's Christmas.  I like the food, which sometimes mixes meat and rice in the same dish, which is something I get yelled at by friends for doing myself with other foods and cuisines.  In Lebanon, the food is all fresh and made with care.  The food in a restaurant though, isn't what grades the establishment.  The service is what counts.  The service is near the best I have ever experienced at any location and when people in America want to make Lebanese restaurants, they fail to bring that same level of service to their place.

  In Lebanon, even the smallest two person restaurant has better service than the Lebanese restaurant I went to, a week ago, in St. Louis, on Grand.  The restaurant is called "The Vine" and they made their selves out to be a restaurant with a small store next door.  We called ahead for reservations, for 8 people and while only my wife and two kids had arrived first, they sat us in a small table and told us that the rest of our table is over there, as the waitress pointed to a table that currently had people sitting at it.  You know, I learned the hard way, that relying on customers to leave their table at a restaurant so you can use it for another customer doesn't work.  You have no idea how long those customers will stay and you can't kick them out nor even suggest to them that they leave.

Our seat, near the door, as it opens and closes each time bringing in the cold air, wasn't the best spot either.  What is sad also, is that the restaurant had an open 4 top next to two open 2 tops, so they could have put my party together right when we came in, but insisted that they put us against the window and make us wait for our table to get completed.  When all of our party was finally there....let's stop right here.  This place has horrible service, they forgot drinks, they forgot straws, they didn't take all the orders at the same time, they forgot things that we ordered and they made us box up our own leftovers.  There was only a single toilet, single person bathroom for both the store next door and the restaurant to share as well.

 The only savings grace of this restaurant is the food, which is done in a traditional manner but not using traditional techniques.  The food received good marks from my father-in-law, who is Lebanese, while commenting that most Lebanese would not patronize this restaurant because they would have expected better service.  The restaurant food is good, like a 3 out of 5, but the service is like a 1 out of 5.  My mother-in-law, actually had to stand up with an empty glass and bring it to the waitress to ask for a refill.  I just don't see how hard it is to run a restaurant because so many people can do it and even do it poorly.

While near the mountains of Southern Lebanon, my family stopped at a small building on the side of the road.  The building held a small wood fire oven and a table out on the front porch.  This was a restaurant, run by a husband and wife team.  Now, the husband stayed inside and made food for us while the wife did the customer service part.  Those two people, did a better job on food and service than this whole restaurant did.  This is why American restaurants cannot do Lebanese.