Soul food: Silvena Rowe on her grandmother's stuffed vine leaves I like to associate memories with food. When I cook aubergines I always think of my father because he loved them. Feta cheese with rye bread and honey is the flavour of my childhood; I've never known a better breakfast than that. And stuffed vine leaves, my favourite dish in the world, are from my grandmother. When I was a child we had a small vineyard by our holiday house, at the base of some hills about five miles from where we lived in Plovdiv in Bulgaria. It was nice and cool there, out of the city. My father made his own wine. And my grandmother blanched the vine leaves and stuffed them with veal, rice and Bulgarian thyme - the most beautiful recipe. It's a time-consuming job. You have to use the top leaves of the vine, the light-green ones, and remember to pack them together tightly so they don't open. She made them like little bonbons and I would eat them one after another, like little melting seeds in my mouth, always with yogurt. When I came to Britain I looked for a vine and eventually found one in a neighbour's garden. They thought I was crazy when I asked if I could cook with the leaves. If I can't get any I use spinach or blanched Swiss chard, and have modernised my grandmother's recipe by stuffing them with chunks of veal from osso bucco.