Stuffed vegetables

You all know how much I love middle-eastern food, so today I gonna try to bring my contribution to your food experience. As usual my recipe will probably have no exact proportions so just do how it feels good and blame me if it isn't because it should. I didn't find any matching recipe on my usual cooking sites so I'll give you more details.

Here I have eaten stuffed zucchinis, eggplants, cabbage leaves, wine leaves, bellpeppers and palm hearts. There are obviously many variations of each but the basics are the same. I'll base myself on zucchinis and cabbage because that's the two I know the best but by extension you can guess what to do. I think wine leaves and palm hearts need additional processing.

First part is to prepare the stuffing, ground lamb meat, rice (~1/5 meat weight, but you can put a lot of rice if you want it to be cheap), finely cut onion (1 big per 500g meat), comino, cinnamon (much less than comino), salt to taste. Put all this together into a bowl, I tend to add a little bit of hot paprika for zucchinis and eggplants.

For the leaves you need to boil them into water for 3-4 minutes, and remove the nerves.

Second part prepare the vegetables. In Europe we tend to slice them in two longitudinally and remove part of their heart, here they do it differently (and I prefer it). Choose small vegetables, ~3cm diameter and less than 15cm long, cut their "head" and empty them. That is the tricky part. Here they do have a special tool to do it without piercing the vegetable, but with a cooking knife I always manage to do it (just takes longer). Stuff them with the meat-rice-spices (make sure it is packed with a finger).

In a non sticking pot (or if it can stick just put some spare leaves at the bottom), put your stuffed vegetables, cover with water and cook for over 45 minutes (until the vegetables are cooked and the rice inside them is overcooked:). One good thing to do is to add tomato concentrate with some hot paprika to the water (for zucchinis, eggplants and bellpeppers at least).

You can add some fresh and finely cut mint and lemon juice just before serving. You can prepare them one day in advance it works pretty well.

Bon appetit !

Mini lexique pour les Francais : Eggplant = aubergine, zucchini = courgette, wine leave = feuille de vigne, cabbage = chou, bellpepper = poivron, ground = haché, comino = cumin, cinnamon = canelle, stuffed = farci, paprika = piment :p.