There are four parts to this preparation:
Prepare the grape leaves
Fill a large pot with salted water and bring it to a roiling boil.
Drop grape leaves into the boiling water in manageable amounts. Let them cook for about 20 seconds. Remove them quickly and lay them
out to dry. You can use paper towels for this, but brown paper bags actually work better.
Prepare the stuffing
Defrost the spinach.
Cook the rice and set aside in a large mixing bowl.
Chop the onion and garlic and sautee in olive oil until the onion is tranlucent. Toss it into the rice.
Squeeze most of the moisture out of the spinach.
Cook the spinach in a large pan with a little water.
Add the cider vinegar to the spinach and mix it in.
Add the cumin and dill to the spinach and mix them in.
Add the spinach mixture to the rice and mix it in thoroughly.
Add the feta (crumbled) and mix it into the rice.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Rolling the dolmas
Set yourself up with the following:
Sit yourself in front of the TV, start the movie and begin rolling.
Lay out a grape leaf on your flat surface.
Scoop up a small amount of rice mixture, roll it into a tube shape.
Place it near the bottom of the grape leaf and roll. The general technique is roll once, tuck in the sides, and then finish rolling.
It's a lot like rolling a joint (without the licking part), so those of you with "that" prior experience will find rolling easy. There are a
lot of leaves in a jar of grape leaves and you just made a lot of stuffing, so this is easily a two-hour operation (hence the movie).
Cooking the dolmas
Stack the dolmas two deep in a glass dish and then cover them with a mixture of water and olive oil (maybe a Tbs).
Cover the dish and cook over a burner until the liquid is gone.
Remove the dolmas to a tray and cover with a damp cloth.
Repeat until all the dolmas are cooked.
You could add ground lamb or chicken to the stuffing.
This is an appetizer, a potluck dish, a picnic dish. It's also time-consuming, so it should be treated as a "special occasion" dish.