Lemony Lamb Dolmas with Avo-Ziki Sauce

I recently got a book from the library entitle Practical Paleo...  I am not actually eating a paleo diet so some of the recipes have to be modified, but it is the closest I can get to the diet I am actually eating (called a ketogenic diet).  This book is one of my mom's favorites.  She actually had it spiral bound because she uses it so much!

 

So this week I decided to try something new, lemony lamb dolmas (page 318) with avo-ziki sauce (page 322).  If you want the recipes, you'll have to get the book from your local library (for free!).  I had never had dolmas before but I have had Greek food so I hoped that I would enjoy this recipe.  After all I love lamb and lemons are pretty nice too. 

This being a paleo recipe (and they don't eat rice), I had to grate some cauliflower to bulk up the meat mixture.  This is the first time I had tried this and by the time I was eating the dolmas I couldn't even tell there was cauliflower in it.  It worked like a charm (though I'm not sure I'm ready to jump on the mock mashed potato bandwagon yet).  

Here is the lamb mixture.  It smelled a little weird but it tasted delicious!  It had nutmeg, cinnamon, cumin, and oregano in it...a very Greek mixture.  It called for raisins but I'm not eating sugar so I left them out...I don't like raisins anyway so I would've left them out all along.

I really wanted to take pictures of the process of working with the grape leaves, but my hands were so messy that I just couldn't.  It was actually pretty easy...a lot like stuffing enchiladas, though it was difficult to get them uniform in size.  After I baked them I found out that it didn't matter that they were uniform in size.  Everything is cooked when you put it in the oven so I think the baking is to let the juices and flavors coalesce into a delicious, aromatic dish.  

While the dolmas baked I made some avo-ziki sauce.  As any lover of Greek food knows, tzatziki is the Greek sauce for dipping and adding to gyros and such.  This avo-ziki sauce is like a nice, cool guacamole with the cucumber tzatziki flavor.  It has one avocado, some grated cucumber, garlic, lemon, olive oil, and fresh dill with salt and pepper to taste.  Just throw it all in to your mini food processor and... 

...here it is.  I actually added too much salt so I will do better next time.  This stuff is delicious.  If I don't make any other recipes from this book, I'm glad I got this one.  Yum!  

Here are my finished dolmas.  This dish took me about two hours to make so I can only recommend it for someone who loves to eat Greek food and loves to try new recipes.  It did make me feel like I was eating at a restaurant though since it was all pretty and such (I was pretty proud of my work).  With each bite I added a small dollop of the avo-ziki sauce and it was delicious.  However, to make this recipe a little more time friendly I would probably try stuffing the meat mixture in a bell pepper--I was not overly fond of the dolmas--or maybe cabbage would be better for me.  There's probably a ton of ways I can modify this recipe to save a little time.  Good thing it tasted good and was totally worth the time and effort.