Dinner Spanakopitas
- By Katie Roche
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- 10 Jul, 2019
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Dinner spanakopitas! Despite this being in the entree chapter, Ina specifies that these are for dinner because spanakopitas are usually small and served as an appetizer or as something alongside an entree, like you’d get garlic bread from an Italian restaurant. I’ve only ever had spanakopitas from two other places: Greek Boys, a restaurant near my work, and the Greek festival in downtown Columbia. In both of those instances, I was not super impressed but I have come to the conclusion that that was because these don’t age well. I will get into that more later.
As for the ItemQuest, strangely enough, I did that at Food Lion! I have been working on putting more time and effort into my ice skating practice, so I’ve been driving out to the ice rink two days a week after work to spend an hour by myself working on my skills. I needed to procure items for this, and needed to choose a grocery store on the way home, and the Irmo Food Lion (the one by the ice rink) is so nice that it might as well not be a Food Lion. It does not live up to Food Lion’s reputation of being kind of sketchy. Between that and the fact that it’s the least out of the way/fraught with traffic, it was the best choice. Thankfully, all I needed was Phyllo dough, feta, and frozen spinach. Phyllo dough is a tough one around Columbia, because some grocery stores have it and some don’t but 100% of grocery employees do not know what it is or where to find it in their store. Food Lion DID have it, which was a bit surprising, but it took me a while to find it because the company changed the packaging and I was looking for a maroon box. It’s weird how our eyes grow accustomed to very particular color schemes for products. When we first moved to Columbia, it took me like 20 minutes in Costco to find sugar because I was looking for the C&H sugar in the bright pink and white bag and that is Not A Thing on the east coast; the main sugar brand out here is Domino and its packaging is yellow. My eyes must have skipped over it in the aisle like five times. Frozen spinach was easy to find, as was feta, I was just OFFENDED at how expensive feta is for being so gross. I needed 12 ounces of it and bought it in a literal brick because it was a lot cheaper than buying it pre-crumbled. Everything else you see: pine nuts (cheapest at Trader Joe’s, if you’re wondering), olive oil, onion, green onions, bread crumbs, Parmesan cheese, and lots of eggs.
Step 1: sweating onions. Yeah, they got a little brown. A little caramelized taste never hurt anyone, okay? Meanwhile, I also had to toast pine nuts:
I had done this once before for the savory palmiers and had to reference that recipe for the proper technique: 5 minutes in a sautee pan over low heat. I was munching these straight from the bag, as I was fresh from the gym and very hungry. I thought they tasted REALLY good, and I insisted Dan taste them, and he INSISTED that he hates them, and I made him eat one anyway, and we bickered about that. A real inside look at what happens in the Roche family kitchen.
So this is a very strange-looking picture, but it’s the frozen spinach thawed, rinsed, and wrung out. I did the first 10 oz and then Dan took over and did the next 10 oz and made faces through the whole process. I get it - it kind of sucks - but in my opinion, this end result is the weirdest part. It looks like a giant green turd. It goes into a mixing bowl with the sweated onions and an absolutely obscene amount of feta, which I was cutting into tiny cubes while Dan was wringing out spinach.
Is ANYTHING worse than this little pee puddle that came out when I opened this package of feta? I’m not sure what the deal is, but one of my greatest aversions ON EARTH is to any type of dairy liquid. The liquid that pools on top of yogurt or sour cream after you’ve opened it and used some and put it back in the fridge. The lil sweat that blocks of cheese get sometimes. Whatever the heck THIS IS. I know things have moisture, I do...but since I already hate feta, this def made me want to vomit.
Dan was *not pleased* to see how much feta went into the filling. Honestly, in this picture, it looks like tofu. Wonder if he’d have preferred that. Anyway! You mix this all up: the eggs go in here, as well as the Parmesan cheese, some bread crumbs, salt, pepper, and, of all things, nutmeg. This is one of a couple of savory recipes I have that call for nutmeg and I can't say I've ever identified an overwhelming nutmeg flavor so whatever it's doing, it's working.
For the build, you unroll a roll of Phyllo dough and stack four sheets of it with melted butter and bread crumbs distributed in between each layer. Your Phyllo really does have to be thawed for this because it's suuuper delicate and flaky and is tough to work with when it's dried out or frozen. I tried at one point during this process to lay a damp paper towel on the pieces I wasn't using yet to prevent it from drying out and learned the hard way that that also does not work - it turns the Phyllo into soggy paper similar to the actual paper towel. So take care to do this quickly if you're giving this a go! Ina says to use 1/3 of a cup of filling, and I actually do measure it, because knowing Ina, her precise measurement was tried and tested. Any more filling and this thing would be tough to fold. Measuring also insures that the recipe yield turns out to be what the recipe says it will be. Call me OCD but, I go with it.
Here I am folding the filling in the Phyllo layers, with careful instruction from Dan and Cam about how to do it. You fold them like you'd fold a flag, but I never fold flags so every time I do this Dan has to supervise. I don't think he folds flags either, tbh, but for some reason he's good at stuff like this. In the background, spy my onion goggles, for prevention of crying, my mason jar of melted butter, for Phyllo-layering, and my gin and tonic. Ever since returning from London, I've been all about that g&t.
I put six of these on this cookie sheet and predictably, honestly believed I could not fit any more. I have the visual-spatial reasoning of a fourth grader. Thankfully Dan and Cam were there to pivot a few of them and, ten seconds later, show me that I could in fact fit all of the m on the same cookie sheet. Once in an effort to help my visual-spatial skills, Dan tried to get me into doing puzzles but, I kid you not, like 20 minutes of puzzling makes my brain feel like I ran a MARATHON. And that is just doing the EDGES. He bribed me by buying me Harry Potter puzzles. It did not work. Puzzling, and apparently, spanakopita positioning, is Not For Me. Anyway these get brushed with more melted butter (yay butter!!!) and sprinkled with sea salt or, if you're me, with kosher salt because, #firstworldproblems: I can't find my white sea salt and I thought my red or black sea salts would look strange on this.
35 minutes later: golden pockets of savory deliciousness! They do look like turnovers and I often describe them to people that way.
Ready to go, spanakopita pictured alongside a serving of pre-packaged salad, as anyone who has ever come within 100 feet of my house knows that I genuinely HATE making salad. All that lettuce rinsing. All that chopping. No thank you. Not when Trader Joe's can do it for me. I realize I should have probably gone with a Greek salad as a side for this, but as I was already inflicting so much feta on Dan and not giving him an out with Totino's pizza like I did for the mushroom risotto post, I chose a salad I knew he would eat. Cam, however, was PUMPED for this and I had invited him over specifically for that reason. All of this effort - all of that delicate-dough flag-folding - I really NEEDED someone to be excited about eating this.
This is the best I could do as far as a picture showing the inside of the spanakopita. You can definitely see the flaky layers which is 100% the best thing about this food. Cam gave rave reviews. He loved it. Here are my thoughts: For one, this is a great option for a dinner entrée if you are hosting vegetarian guests. It's something interesting that isn't just pasta with vegetables or any of the things vegetarians are used to eating when meat-eaters have to think outside the box and cook for them. Second, the other great thing about this food is that it is a good template for other types of fillings. While I don't personally love feta, I have used this recipe as a template before and changed up the filling. I made a spinach-artichoke version with cream cheese, but I can think of a lot of filling ideas that would be good. A sun-dried tomato filling would be good. You could add cooked chicken. Something with lots of herbs and spring vegetables similar to the last risotto could be nice. As long as you keep the major components (eggs, bread crumbs, cheese), give anything a try and fold it up like a delicious crunchy flag and eat it.
This isn't particularly basic in execution - you have to have a freaking college degree in origami to fold something so delicate so many times. I also would not consider it "basic" because if you tell someone it's what's for dinner, they'll be like, "Bless you." And then have no idea what you actually said. That being said, I do advise giving it a try because once you get the hang of it, it's not that complicated, and people LOVE eating handheld foods wrapped in flaky pastry dough. I do recommend being prepared to vacuum or sweep or whatever, because when you bite into it, the AUDIBLE crunching sound of all those layers also sprays your entire table with tiny flakes of Phyllo. If three or four people are eating one at once, your kitchen floor is going to look like it's been covered in a layer of beach sand. I'm sure Ina has someone in her Hamptons barn/studio that follows her around with a dust-buster...but for the rest of us plebeians, we're gonna have to do it basic and clean up after ourselves.
This isn't particularly basic in execution - you have to have a freaking college degree in origami to fold something so delicate so many times. I also would not consider it "basic" because if you tell someone it's what's for dinner, they'll be like, "Bless you." And then have no idea what you actually said. That being said, I do advise giving it a try because once you get the hang of it, it's not that complicated, and people LOVE eating handheld foods wrapped in flaky pastry dough. I do recommend being prepared to vacuum or sweep or whatever, because when you bite into it, the AUDIBLE crunching sound of all those layers also sprays your entire table with tiny flakes of Phyllo. If three or four people are eating one at once, your kitchen floor is going to look like it's been covered in a layer of beach sand. I'm sure Ina has someone in her Hamptons barn/studio that follows her around with a dust-buster...but for the rest of us plebeians, we're gonna have to do it basic and clean up after ourselves.
For this post, I wanted to combine two summertime flavors into the crisp recipe one of my oldest Alaskan friends passed on to me years ago. Rhubarb, if you're unfamiliar, is a reddish stalk that kind of resembles really big celery. It's very tart and is most commonly paired with strawberry. I've rarely seen it star in its own show dessert-wise, but my friend Kylee has been making rhubarb crisp for years and it's the best crisp I know of. Blueberries are usually in season in late summer; I have not been home for a blueberry season since Dan's last deployment in 2018 so in order to make this recipe I actually used blueberries from a friend's parents' farm in upstate SC! They're a little sweeter than the blueberries I'd have picked at home, but they worked well. I'm going to pretend like I was actually picking blueberries at home in Alaska for the purpose of showing you what that would look like.
I was getting all ready to write this post, going through my process with photos starting in my kitchen when I realized that a lot of my friends probably don't know what fireweed is or where it comes from and this recipe actually starts far, far away from my kitchen. This will be the first of a few posts highlighting iconic Alaskan ingredients. I've wanted to do this for a while because my home inspires me in so many ways, writing and cooking particular among them. Fireweed is a wildflower that is rather ubiquitous in southcentral Alaska and is often considered a gauge for how long summer will last. It is said that when the blooms reach the top of the plant, winter is six weeks away. Whether or not that's accurate, fireweed is found all over in late summer in Alaska. Here is some I spotted in mid-July by Eklutna Lake:
If you know Dan and me very well, you probably know by now that if our life were a sitcom, he'd low-key be the funniest character. Because that is true, I thought I'd include his bottom ten with accompanying remarks before giving the actual bottom ten. His are hilarious, but aren't as legitimate as mine because he actually tried way fewer of these than one might think. I realized as he was flipping through the book that my old coworker Cam probably ate more of these foods than anyone else did. The overarching theme of Dan's song of Ina Garten hatred is not the actual taste of the finished product but more how asinine he finds that particular recipe to be. So here you are, Dan's bottom ten.
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
You guys asked for my top ten from the blog, so here we go! And I'm thinking that what you *really* want is actually the bottom ten, so I'll go ahead and give you those next week. That post will probably be A LOT funnier. While preparing to write this post, I had Dan flip through the cookbook to give me HIS top ten and he was all disgruntled as he did so and only came up with eight that he even liked at all. "I'm not a picky eater!" he insists. Yeah ok. Although to be fair, I've seen some cookbooks I would only make, like, one thing out of and plenty I'd make nothing out of, though sometimes that's because I find the chef so annoying. @ the Pioneer Woman. I just don't trust someone who puts sour cream in spaghetti and then bakes it. Plus all her recipe intros are about, like, Ladd or Tadd or whatever the heck her husband's name is "coming in from the fields starving for dinner". If I came in from working in a field and you tried to give me sour cream spaghetti, I'd be like, "How about a hot pocket instead? Thx." Anyway, this is not Dan's blog so these are not his top ten. You can ask him which ones he liked, but you'll end up in a long convo about how much he hates Ina Garten. Anyway, these are not ranked or anything, they're just in order from the cookbook.
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
It was Sunday afternoon and I thought to myself, "What a perfect time to make jam!" I mean, how positively quaint: just sitting in my home in suburbia, finished with weekend chores, relaxing with some knitting...why not? Why not make some jam? I mean, obviously my afternoon-kitchen-activity was directed toward jam-making because it was next up in the book BUT whatever, I was kind of excited! Also, this is the last recipe in this book!!! I'm still in the process of deciding what I'll do now, so if there's something you'd like me to make and tell you about in my own fashion - you know, with lots of tangents and jokes - please do let me know! I'll likely continue to tackle Ina content, but may start including some recipe faves and/or foods people text me about a lot! I get a lot of cake questions, a LOT of frosting questions (because meringue buttercream is bae and I've got everyone in my social circles who eats my food on board), and a lot of fish questions. So look for more food to come, even though this is the last recipe in Back to Basics.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
I was glad Ina gave me something easy for this week, because I was packing for Alaska and just *did not have the time* to mess with hunting lobsters or weird cheeses from the internet or whatever. ItemQuest was fairly straightforward, just took Dan a trip to the liquor store next to the Publix for some limoncello. I grabbed this particular lemon curd in the British aisle of Publix; I think last time an Ina recipe called for lemon curd I bought it from Trader Joe's and it was DISGUSTING. I mean, truly awful. I would like to recommend making your own lemon curd if you have the time and the inclination. Ina's lemon curd recipe is phenomenal and it is one thing for which I can say she is truly correct: homemade is BETTER and store-bought is not at all as good. The most beloved cupcakes I have ever made were filled with Ina's lemon curd, and had the lemon curd mixed into the meringue buttercream frosting. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!! Anyway, the rest of this was fruit that I had on hand, mint, and Greek yogurt which we did have to buy because I don't, as a rule, eat Greek yogurt of my own free will. It's chalky and disgusting.
Dates are something I honestly never even thought about until I did Whole 30. I have mentioned my Whole 30 experience several times over the course of this journey through Back to Basics, but if you're new to reading the blog, this is what happened: I did Whole 30 one time, just to prove that I could, because salvation-by-diet apologists were obsessed with it as the newest fad in righteous eating practices. It was a terrible experience; on top of hating every minute of it for myself and finding exactly zero wellness benefits, I also hated it for Dan who was not allowed to eat popcorn for 30 days. Dan is in love with popcorn; his addiction to it is almost at the level of my addiction to coffee. He gets rage-y without it. But anyway, Whole 30 recipes are big into dates as sweeteners and some of the things you can eat, like Lara Bars, are made with dates. Dates are impossibly chewy. I ate more of them in that 30 days than I ever wanted to, and now when I see them in recipes I can't help but think of that Whole 30. Fortunately for me, I got to begin this recipe by chopping TWO CUPS' worth of dates. Oh, they also kind of look like cockroach bodies, so there's that. The only thing I actually had to get at the store for this was oranges! I had everything else on hand, even Cointreau, thanks to many previous Ina recipes.
Alright so, I'm not the Muffin Man. I don't really make a whole lot of muffins, for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being that on the rankings of breakfast foods they definitely do not crack the top five, maybe not even the top ten. If I have an option for a bagel or a waffle, I'll pick one of them over a muffin every single time. I also prefer cereal, cinnamon rolls, or *cue eye roll* avocado toast. I've just never risen from my slumber and been like, "You know what would really hit the spot right now? A MUFFIN." But!!! In recent months, since my friend Logan came into my life, I've been making muffins a lot more frequently because he really loves them. So the last blueberry muffins I made were from a 99cent Betty Crocker mix packet which he brought into my house and asked me sweetly to make, because they're what he grew up with and along with many preservatives, they are full of nostalgia for him. Here is Logan and me, preparing to mix the muffin batter. Out of respect (and to make up for the disrespect of rolling up with muffin mix), he wore one of my aprons. I will treasure this picture forever.
You guys...Ina has "a thing" about commercial granola bars. Her beef with them, apparently, is that they say they contain real fruit and nuts but that all she sees when she looks at the labels are like, ten different kinds of corn syrup. I'm going to go ahead and guess, just based on this, that none of the lunches her mom packed for her growing up contained any Fruit By the Foot. And surely if we introduced her to Gushers, she would die. This is a real shame. I also feel like this disdain for corn syrup is maybe just a tad self-righteous, coming from the woman whose frosting recipe calls for literally six entire sticks of butter. At that point, what's a little corn syrup to you really? People's nutritional hills-to-die-on really fascinate me (and also kind of annoy me sometimes) and the ones about sugar might get me the most. I feel like, at some point, sugar is sugar and whether you're baking with honey, white sugar, brown sugar, molasses, maple syrup, etc you're still probably making something that's not amazing for you so, in terms of sugar, why not just be in for a penny in for a pound, amirite? So while I'm on this topic, before I even get to the actual point (please, I know you're here for the tangents), I would like to just let anyone and everyone know that I'm absolutely not interested in your "healthy substitutes" for things that taste good in their original form. I do not WANT a chocolate chip pancake made out of bananas and grains you harvested in your field this morning. If I want a banana I will eat one, and if I want a chocolate chip pancake I will eat one, and that's that. And DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT come @ me with "cashew cheese". Just don't. I don't even think I should honor that concept with an explanation of why it's so wrong. If that's not self-evident, I can't help you.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
At first I saw the pictures of this and thought, "YAY!!! Cinnamon rolls!" And then a couple of weeks ago, I actually tried making cinnamon rolls for the first time and realized that my inability to roll/shape/slice yeast doughs is still a thing. AND THEN I read this entire recipe and realized these get filled with raisins. So here we go!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!