Glorious Food of the Week

Stuffed grape leaves, steaming dark-green packets of West-Asian goodness the size of a child's palm. I first encountered them at the home of the Assyrian neighbors when I was about ten. The Assyrians were always exotic to me, even if they did have the only other children on that forsaken city street. Who would suspect, Iraqi Christians? Though I guess it would it explain why they left. I remember when we brought the father a paper bag of figs from our trees, and he ate it whole instead of pulling the black velvet skin apart and scraping out the pink fructose goo with his teeth. Anyway, that family had grape vines, and when I came over to play video games and basketball with their son, I was always served whatever the rest of the uncles, aunts, grandparents, and cousins who happened to be visiting were having. When we moved into the exurbic farming community filled with, by the way, more racial tension caused by less racial diversity, we planted our own grape vines. And I made my own stuffed grape leaves.
Picture this: rice, meat, onion, mint, tomatoes, allspice, non-iodized salt, full-bodied olive oil without a hint of bitterness, and the lemony flavor of tender grape leaves picked right off the vine. Heaven via saucepan.