Rushing to harvest grape leaves

Why wait for the fruit?

The more I ignore online food content in favor of scouring my neighborhood for things to eat, the more the urgency of late spring and early summer stresses me out. Tik Tok trends come and go within a matter of months, but have you seen how quickly spruce tips go from tender to inedible? EAT ME NOW, our green garlic shouted in May before its shoots thickened into papery bulbs. EAT ME NOW OR ELSE, warned the violets in our yard as their edges withered and toughened. During the two weeks I traveled out of town, Portland’s surprise heat wave killed off half of the spring projects I intended to tackle.

In response, I started monitoring our new grapevine every day. We planted the vine next to the garage last year, and this spring it exploded into action. Shoots have raced up the trellis, throwing out leaves as they climb. And the leaves themselves have morphed from chartreuse and malleable to glossy and fibrous within a matter of days.

We won't get any fruit from our little vine this year. But fruit was only half of the reason I wanted to plant grapevines. After making rice-stuffed dolmas with a friend's grape leaves last spring, I've been looking for the right time to pluck off enough tender leaves to cook with. However, our new plant is only putting out leaves the size of my palm. I don't know if that's just the size this cultivar produces, of if bigger leaves will appear once it matures.

North Portland doesn't lack for grapevines, which escape over fences and spill over T-shaped trellises. I keep passing them on our walks, running my fingers over the leaves to see if they're ideal or too stiff to make dolmas with. My Plan B was to drop off a couple of postcards on strangers' doorsteps, asking if I could glean some grape leaves. But then my first attempt at cold-calling the neighbors fell flat.

This March, I kept passing one yard with a lush mat of chickweed and dead-nettle, which foraging bloggers claim make great pesto (then again, every weed apparently makes good pesto). I slipped a friendly note — well, I thought it was a friendly note — through the mailbox asking if I could snip off a few of the plants, and ... nothing. Apparently no one wants to hear that they have a good-looking patch of weeds on their front lawn.

So, Plan C: I called up my source from last year, and drove over to Southeast Portland to pick up five dozen or so grape leaves. We drank wine and pruned the vine, and I amassed a stack of tender leaves that ranged in size from my hand to Andre the Giant's hand.

There are many recipes out there for vegetarian dolmas stuffed, Turkish-style, with rice, currants, pine nuts, and herbs. Because I trust Claudia Rosen, I used her version from Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon. I blanched the leaves in boiling water for a minute, just to make them tender and pliable. Then I rolled each leaf around a few tablespoons of soaked short-grain rice flavored with dried fruit, walnuts, and aromatics from the yard. If you've made cabbage rolls, egg rolls, or Vietnamese salad rolls, the rolling process for dolma is far from a daunting task, so it only took me an hour to cover the bottom of a six-quart pot with small green cigars. I poured a mixture of tomatoes, lemon, olive oil, and water overtop, then let the stuffed leaves simmer away for an hour. Then I let them cool, and stashed several days' worth of appetizers and light lunches in the refrigerator.

I have to say, I used up the larger leaves first, and I should have prioritized the mid-sized ones instead—this year's batch of dolma came out a tad chewy. Or perhaps I waited one week too long to glean them. But the flavor of the just-picked grape leaves was still more vivid and multidimensional than the oil-drenched, canned dolmas that some Mediterranean restaurants still serve. The remaining blanched grape leaves went into the freezer, just in case I want to make dolmas again this winter. Spring's urgent new growth may be inedible in a week, but a freezer is forever.