Since I was too mangled too make a spinach pie on what was left of New Year's Eve, we made the spinach pie on New Year's Day, which I thought wasn't a bad deal.
I've tried many versions of spinach and cheese over the years. Delis in midtown west around my work serve alot of spanikopita, which requires buttery, flaky layers of phyllo. Tasty but complicated, fussy, and kinda price to DIY. Plus, blokey doesn't care for it. I've made regular pie crusts (doubled), and soda bread style whole wheat crusts. For this recipe, I used the leftover pita dough (half of the recipe) as the crust, and it came out as something between a pizza, a calzone, and a galette/tart. It was good, and I mostly fudged the recipe.
LeftyCook's 2010 Spinach pie
Ingredients:
1 standard supermarket bag of baby spinach from that organicky brand (or two washed, rinsed, chopped heads of spinach)
1/2 onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
6-8 baby bella mushrooms (optional),
1 Tbsp of butter
1/4 c. of walnuts, crushed (for crunch, also totally optional)
salt
pepper
Hungarian paprika
3 oz. of feta cheese
1 egg
1/2 of the mostly whole wheat pita dough (see previous post)
cook off, liquid!Preheat oven to 375
1. Saute onions and garlic in butter over medium heat, until fragant and soft/translucent. Add the mushrooms. If it seems dry, add more butter. Cook, stirring occassionally, until mushrooms begin to give off liquid.
2. Add the spinach. This will start to wilt and also give off liquid. The key to this recipe is you want to cook of as much liquid in the pan so it doesn't soggy up your pie. Ick.
3. After the liquid is mostly cooked off, add salt, pepper and paprika to taste.
4. Beat the egg in a small bowl. Add most of it to the spinach mixture, but not all of it or it will get all sogg again.
5. Divide the dough into 2 balls. Roll out until relatively thin but not breaking
6. This gets difficult. Spoon about half the spinach mixture into each dough circle. Then try to close it. As this fails, do the best you can to make a crush or galette type encirclement on top.
7. Bake about 20-30 minutes at 375 degrees or until the mixture is set.
Serve with a tomato salad (chopped cherry tomatoes, chopped parsley, olive oil, lemon and salt), some olives, and cucumber/yogurt sauce (see previous post)
rollin' out the dough
more like a chicago-style deep dish spinach pie
this one is more like a rustic gallette spinach pie
2 comments:
Ooh, that looks awesome! I've made more traditional spanikopita twice in the past. It's fairly easy but a little time-consuming and yes, phyllo dough isn't cheap. My big complaint is that it's a hell of a lot of work to do just to feed yourself or two people. I'd probably make it again for some kind of larger get-together though.
Yeay for spinach pies!
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