Making dolma (Turkish for any stuffed dish) calls for so many steps and so much patience that I like to keep it for the days when you cook for the whole week ahead. Waiting for your rice to soak, simmer, steam, cool down and then get cooked in dolma becomes less painstaking if meanwhile you are preparing meat stock to make a soup or pressure cooking chickpeas to turn them into hummus.
This Sunday could have been such a cooking-ahead-day but turned different: the snowfall closed the way up to our farmhouse at the Istanbul countryside. Which meant that early morning we put together a huge breakfast for the guests who arrived the night before and relaxed for the rest of the day as no one else dared the steep hill taking you 500 m above the sea level. Once the breakfast was over we were so happy with the sun and snow that immediately put the rice to soak and went out to made a snowman.
