Baked Turkey Dumplings

I'm writing this down as it's fresh in my mind, and still baking in the oven. We'll see how good it really is when it comes out. I made the recipe with random stuff I just had lying around in my kitchen. The grape leaves and phyllo dough make this recipe kinda greek, but I there's Italian elements in there too like the cheese. So I don't know. Let's wait and see how they come out. In the meantime, I'm going to skip down to typing in what I did, and then I'll follow up back up here to tell you whether it was a success or not. Au revoir...

And the verdict is...

SUCCESS!!! These things are delicious. I'm a most excited camper. Here's a photo.

click to enlarge

Man, they were so good I woofed down three of them in like, ten minutes. While writing. I will definitely make these again. Now go read the recipe, and learn.

Ingredients:

1lb ground turkey
1 yellow onion
1 shallot clove
fresh oregano, about a tablespoon
1/2 teaspoon of thyme
butter
spash of cabernet
fillo dough
3 tablespoons ricotta cheese
3 tablespoons chopped or shredded mozarella
pickled grape leaves, like you'd use for stuffing. About 3 tbs
Seasoned breadcrumbs
1 egg
salt and pepper

Ok. Here's what I did.

Preheat oven to 440.

Julienne the onion, and throw it into a saucepan with a tablespoon of butter over medium high heat. Slice the shallot thinly and throw it in the same saucepan. Allow them to caramelize. As they get soft, add the oregano and thyme. The oregano will turn dark in color. Then, take grape leaves, roll them up and slice thinly, leaving you with strips of leaves. Add to the pan. They will sizzle a bit, and wilt. You'll begin to see a brown coating on teh bototm of the pan. Remove pan contents and allow to cool. Deglaze pan with come cab.

When the onion/grape leaves mixture is cooled down, add to the ground turkey, along with an egg. Add deglazed cabernet. Mix with your hands until everything is well distributed. Start adding breadcrumbs. Do this until the turkey mixture, which should be quite sticky, begins to hold its own, and stops sticking to your hands so much. Then, add cheese, salt and pepper to taste (don't actually taste it at this point, just guess). Complete by mixing through thoroughly.

Take fillo dough out, and defrost it. Actually, it should be relatively defrosted already. Take a baking sheet and rub butter all over it. Then, cut your fillo dough into 5" x 2.5" strips. Fold strip so it's doubled over, and lay down on sheet. Take a generous helping of the stuffing, and put it in the middle. Then, put a similar piece of dough on teh top of the dumpling. Brush with butter to get it to stick (in retrospect, I probably should have used an egg wash, but whatever). This yielded me 14 dumplings. You may have more or less, depending on how good your construction methods are. Mine are pretty bad. I'm a clutz with the phyllo dough, and if it were up to me, I'd have made my dumplings a bit smaller.

click to enlarge

Put all these dumplings in the oven and wait. I had them stacked on two sheets, one on top of the other, and the top sheet finished first, in like 35 minutes. The bottom one took a bit longer.