Food for Fuel: My Big Fat Greek Project

October 6, 2008 at 10:23 am | Posted in Food, Nutrition, Other, Rice, Quinoa, and Other Grains, Seafood, Vegetable Side Dishes | 6 Comments

One of my favorite things to get at Greek restaurants are dolmas (also referred to as dolmathes). I crave them quite often, so I looked up this recipe, decided it looked easy enough, and made them last night. Dolmas take a long time to finish, but most of the cooking time is hands-off, so my Greek food fest was the perfect Sunday evening cooking project and left me lots of study time while they simmered!

I scaled down this recipe to make 15 dolmas. I used a short-grain brown rice for the stuffing. It took much longer to cook than I prefer, so maybe next time I will go back to my instant Uncle Ben’s. I found the grape leaves in the Mediterranean section of my local grocery store. They come in a jar.

I was able to get more than a teaspoon of stuffing into each grape leaf, but they need to be closed tightly, so you don’t want to overstuff (a problem that I have with fajitas).

I packed them tightly into my pot in the hopes that this would help keep the rice from spilling out. After this I added the lemon juice, but I didn’t see the point in using olive oil also. I added a cup of chicken broth and simmered for an hour.

I decided to eat some of the dolmas as a side dish to a fantastic Greek salad, complete with fresh sockeye salmon. I found this recipe and decided to scale it down to use as a marinade for my salmon. I marinaded the salmon for most of the afternoon and then baked it for 10 minutes at 450*. It was a perfect Sunday treat!

For the salad, I used mixed greens, baby spinach, shallot, cucumber, Roma tomato, jarred artichoke hearts, kalamata olives, and of course, a liberal helping of feta.

Isn’t it pretty with the dolmas arranged around the plate? 🙂

And…I consider a Greek feast to be incomplete without tzatziki sauce! I made mine with the following:

• 1/2 cup non-fat Greek yogurt
• Heaping teaspoon dried dill
• 1 clove jarred minced garlic
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• Dash of salt
• Squirt of lemon juice
• Green onion

Served on the side for dolma dipping and salad spreading.

It was a wonderful meal and I have dolmas and tzatziki sauce left for lunch and beyond!

Nutrition of this Meal:

This meal contains 18 (record!?) ingredients from the World’s Healthiest Foods list:

• Salmon
• Cucumber
• Garlic
• Onion
• Olives
• Romaine lettuce
• Spinach
• Tomato
• Salmon
• Low-fat cheese
• Yogurt
• Olive oil
• Lemon
• Brown rice
• Black pepper
• Dill
• Basil
• Oregano

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