Aussie Farmers Direct Challenge

Silverbeet is a green leafy vegetable. Green leafy vegetables and I have a love hate relationship (you can read about that here).

Dolma and I have a love love relationship, I can never get enough of them, yet they are something I’ve not tried to make at home.

Then I found this fabulous recipe using a crock pot over at Greek Recipes with May Lerios.  It occurred to me I might be able to do this with my silverbeet instead of the more traditional vine leaves.  Plus I have a brand spanking new baby 1.5L crockpot I wanted to try out – thanks Mum!

For the most part I followed May Lerios recipe that I linked to but I did use a smaller amount of ingredients, here is my revised list.

Ingredients

1 bunch of Silverbeet / Swiss Chard

1 medium Onion – finely chopped

1 tsp Olive Oil (to cook the onion)

500g Minced Beef

1/2 cup Arborio Rice

2 tbsp Olive Oil

1/2 tsp Dried Oregano (I couldn’t find the mint)

1 Beef Stock Cube diluted in 1/4 cup very hot water

3 tbsp Lemon Juice

Couple of twists of the pepper grinder.

To Prepare the Silverbeet / Swiss Chard.

I washed the leaves and then sliced the stems off, leaving a V shape similar to the vine leaves in May Lerios recipe that I’ve linked to above.  Out of my bunch of silverbeet I got about 10 leaves large enough to use.

Bring a large saucepan of water to the boil and drop in the leaves.  Reduce heat to medium.  Once the water starts to boil again remove the leaves and place into a bowl of iced water.  This was tricky to do without breaking the leaves.  I ended up using a couple of large slotted serving spoons.

The rest of the recipe was made up as per May Lerios instructions in the link - I wont repeat them because she did great step by step instructions with pictures.

Because I was using my new baby crockpot I didn’t have a plate small enough to put in the bottom so I improvised with tin foil.  I did have enough little silverbeet leaves left to layer over the top of the foil.

Then I swaddled my mince mixture in the silverbeet leaves, seriously it was exactly the same technique I used to use to swaddle my girls when they were babies… well with the exception of wrapping their heads up in the blanket

I fit two layers of made up dolma in my baby crockpot and used some more tin foil in lieu of a plate on the top.

Then I had a problem – nothing heavy enough and small enough to weigh the dolma down.  More improvisation with rubber bands.  The very same rubber bands that had not so long ago been used to hold the bunch of silverbeet together, I felt like MacGyver.

The Verdict – These were good.  I was a little frustrated about the cooking times, 90 minutes on low heat and then 45 minutes on high heat cooked them perfectly.  I think what frustrated me most was throwing out the dolmade I tested after 90minutes because it wasn’t done.  Dislike food wastage.  That said I think these might become a regular dish in our house and thus I’d eventually get my cooking times down pat.  They are delicious.  Using the tin foil was inspired, far less to wash up, which is really important because I’m not sharing these babies with anyone else, they are mine, MINE, ALL MINE!

Over at my other blog I’ve written about how the Rockmelon from this weeks Aussie Farmer Direct box rocked my view of Autism – specifically related to sensory / food issues.