My kids have been giving me issues about eating rice lately. It makes it challenging to cook for them, because as it is, they don’t eat gluten, and give me issues with I attempt to serve alternative grains such as buckwheat, quinoa, millet, and corn meal….  They aren’t opposed to all rice- they’ll eat it in sushi, they love stuffed grape leaves, enjoy rice porridge, and rice noodles, but I try making rice sometimes and hoping they’ll eat it, and often get left with a bunch of leftovers.

This last time I made rice was no exception, and I’ll admit it- I flopped it. The rice was cooking with chicken and tomato paste, but didn’t even cook evenly. There were parts of the rice that were hard and undercooked, so getting anyone to eat that rice wasn’t going to happen. I didn’t want to throw out my large pan of rice, so I thought to revamp it into dolmades, but instead of using the standard grape leaves to stuff, I picked some large wild swiss chard/sea beet (beta vulgaris maritima) and beet leaves to stuff.

Beta vulgaris maritima on the right, beet leaves on the left. Very similar looking other than the color of the veins.

Because my rice was already tomato flavored, I thought to flavor it in a Greek way, with mint and dill and onion, the same way I season my stuffed peppers and zucchini (even if this isn’t the standard seasoning Greeks use for stuffing their vine leaves), so added that to my leftover tomatoey rice, and mixed it well. I also added some more salt and lemon juice, because part of the appeal of dolmades, in my opinion, is their acidity.

 I attempted to make these rolls multiple ways, flopping them many times, until I finally figured out the trick.
Raw leaves cracked when I tried to roll them up. The midrib of the leaves also got in the way of rolling them up.
The way that worked for me was first soaking all of the leaves in boiling water to soften them, then cutting off whatever part of the midrib that I could. After cutting it, I used my nails to scrape them down even further, so that the leaf was totally flexible.


Depending on the shape and size of the leaf, I either rolled them lengthwise or widthwise. The largest leaves I cut into two and turned into two dolmades.

For the leaves that were too small, I actually used two leaves overlapped to make the rolling easier and have the rice stay inside, with one leaf going sideways and one leaf up and down, in a T shape, and it worked amazingly.