Grape Leaves

On the way back from lunch with a friend at the Amaranth Café I made a stop at a nearby park and drive to pick grape leaves. The grape leaves we use for middle east cooking come from vines that do not produce grapes but are common everywhere. I have found them in Appalachia and Guatemala and everywhere else I have looked. I sometimes found myself self-conscious and receiving strange looks when picking leaves off a vine. However, June is the best month of the year in Wisconsin to pick grape leaves and so I do.

Stuffed Grape Leaves is the most popular food for the Graf Family. This is what my mother, of Lebanese descent, made to celebrate special occasions. My brothers and their families have developed a taste for them. Even my grandchildren Graf Kids consider grape leaves a special and most desirable food.

A few years ago, after my parents had died, we developed the Graf Family Grape Leaves Club and being the oldest in the Graf Family I declared myself the president. However, only my wife, who learned from my mom and my youngest brother, 18 years younger than I, really cooks the clean leaves. I pick grape leaves, help roll them and certainly eat them but lack the confidence to really make them.

Part of the reason for this is that there is never been a formal recipe for Grape Leaves. It was just something passed on by mother to daughters or daughter in laws. At the urging of friends my wife took recipes already on the web and tweaked them with our family way of making Grape Leaves for the recipes that appears on this web page.

Grape leaves, stuffed with meat and rice or vegetables are delicious. Most persons, even those who pride themselves in growing organic, sustainable food, just walk by or ignore grape leaves every day.

They are so ordinary, common and everywhere that this extraordinary is often forgotten — but not by the Graf family.

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