Puff, Puff, Pies
Every once in a while - not too often of course - I stop blogging about food for long enough to go cook something. Spinach pie (spanakopita) is one of the first semi-gourmet things I figured out how to make. It’ s one of those dishes that is fairly easy to do but somehow still really impresses people.
Unfortunately, I seem to have run into some bad kitchen karma lately, possibly due to my making fun of gansie and Howie. While shopping for ingredients, I made a major mistake and bought plain old puff pastry dough instead of perfect phyllo. So I had my spinach filling all mixed and ready to go, and opened up my phyllo to discover that instead of 100 sheets of beautiful flaky goodness, I had four doughy layers of puff that would be much better for making some kind of weird English meat pie than the delicate spanakopita.
I grabbed a rolling pin and did some emergency work, flattening them out to more sheet-like layers and then just went ahead and made it anyway. Fortunately, this was one of those “how bad can it be” situations, since it was still a mixture of dough, butter, spinach and cheese.
Recipe, assuming you buy the correct ingredients, after the jump.
For the filling, mix together:
-1 package of defrosted frozen spinach (I think it’s much easier to work with for this than leafy fresh spinach)
-1 chopped yellow onion
-1 block of crumbled feta cheese. I don’t crumble it as small as if you’re putting it in a salad - I like to leave it in bigger chunks so you get some nice big tastes of it.
-1 egg
-Season to taste with salt, pepper, garlic powder.
Construct the pie in a large pyrex dish:
-Melt 1/2 stick of butter. Using a pastry brush, grease the bottom of the dish.
-Spread layers of the phyllo across the dish, liberally buttering them with the pastry brush every 3 or 4 layers.
-After about 15 layers, spread your spinach filling across the phyllo.
-Add 15 more layers of phyllo on top of the spinach in the same manner - make sure to butter the top layer so you get that crispy brown finish.
-Bake at 375 for 45 minutes or until you get that golden-brown goodness.
If there are any Greek grandmas out there, let me know if I missed anything.
on September 10th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
do you ever vary the spinach mixture…I’d think some red pepper flakes would be great here.
on September 10th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
red pepper would be good…I’ve actually been trying to think of something major to add - I’ve tried chicken but the texture was a bit off, was thinking maybe roasted red peppers or somethign spicy next time
on September 10th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
How about finely diced kalamata olives?
on September 10th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
oh WOW that is an amazing idea…def going in the mix next time
on September 11th, 2007 at 10:56 am
You might also think about adding pine nuts for some crunch.
on September 11th, 2007 at 11:30 am
JoeHoya! You’re back! We missed you! Tell us about Peru, please.
on September 11th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
I’ve been back! But it’s nice to know I was missed. Peru was a great time - lots of fun things to eat (alpaca, guinea pig, strange fruits that look HORRIBLE but taste less horrible) and definitely an amazing trip.
I don’t want to hijack BS’s spanakopita discussion, but I’d be happy to email you some details or fill you in some other way if you’d like.
on September 11th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
have any food pics to share?
on September 11th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
As luck would have it, one of the other volunteers on the program we did took photos of pretty much EVERYTHING - something like 2500 pictures over the course of two weeks. She got pictures of a lot of our meals, including all of the foods I mentioned above and quite a few others.