Spanikopita

Uh...yum.

We just said goodbye to our friends, who came to join us for dinner tonight. They're both very kitchen-savvy, so we collaborated on a menu. There were Cornish game hens for the protein, and pommes anna, sauteed green and yellow beans, thyme and honey roasted carrots, and a wild rice salad in vinaigrette. For the period before dinner, we munched on shrimp and ate sliced apples and pears with a creamy feta dip plus a few pistachios. Dessert was apple pie with cinnamon whipped cream.

It was all really tasty, and surprisingly easy for me. I'll make all those things again and I will probably solicit the recipe for the wild rice salad for future use.

But for me, the star was a small dish of spanikopita I made.

Spanikopita is Greek spinach pie. It's absolutely delicious, and it includes several things I love (spinach, feta, pine nuts (sometimes) and phyllo). I made it once before, and it was a huge pain in the butt. Tonight, I was winging it, making the recipe up as I went, and it was much, much easier and a great success.

First, I decided to make a very small dish. This is because processing a ton of spinach is a pain in my butt. Plus, this is not something that most people want to eat a ton of.

So here's what I did. I got:

1 very small gratin dish/pie dish (like 6 inches square and 1.5 or 2 inches deep).
2 bags of washed baby spinach.
1 small block of feta (you could get one of those little containers of crumbled feta. My store was out of those.)
4 or 5 small shallots
4 or 5 cloves of garlic
a big handful of pine nuts
A ton of butter
A package of phyllo (aka filo) dough, usually found in the frozen foods section. Thaw it by putting it in your fridge a couple of days ahead of the cooking.

What I did to make the filling:

Take out your small soup pot with lid. Put in a tiny bit of stock or water, and set over medium heat. Push in a bunch of spinach. Put on the lid and let it wilt a bit. Then add more spinach, stirring it up. Eventually, you're cooking all the spinach into a soggy mess. Take it off the heat and let it cool off.

Have a cup of tea.

Cut up the shallots pretty fine (don't be a freak about it), and sweat* them in butter in a small sautee pan. After they're good and sweaty, add the garlic and cook another 5 minutes or so with the heat a little less. What you're making is a buttery, onion-y, garlic-y mix that you'll be adding to the filling. Remove from heat and toss in a bowl and let it cool.

Go back to the spinach. Picking up bits, squeeze the water out. Squeeze hard. Chop it a little just to break up the leaves. Transfer to a mixing bowl.

Take about 3 ounces of feta and chop it up into little crumbles. Add this to the cool, squeezed, chopped, spinach. Stir.

Go back to the stove. Heat up a small pan (non-stick if you have it. Your omelet pan is perfect if you have one). Toss in the pine nuts. Toast them. You're just getting a little color on them, then take them off the heat and transfer them into a bowl to cool.

Once everything is cool, mix the spinach and feta with the shallots/garlic and the pine nuts. Put this aside until you need it, or use it right away.

To assemble, do this:
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F.

Melt a bunch of butter. Like half a stick.

Get out the phyllo. Get out a cookie sheet. Lay a dish towel on the cookie sheet, and sprinkle or spray with a little water so it's barely moist. Unwrap the phyllo (it will look like a bunch of sheets of really thin paper) and lay it on the towel. Anytime you're not working with it, cover the dough with the moist towel. If the dough dries out, it will tear constantly.

Take your teensy dish, butter it with a brush. Pull off a piece of phyllo and fit it into the dish. Since your dish is small, you'll probably need to tear the piece or fold it. Do what you like. I folded. Brush the piece with butter so it's wet with it.

Repeat that several times so you have layers of the dough, each one saturated with butter, and your dish looks sort of like a gift that's been unwrapped. There should be dough hanging over the edges, because you're going to fold those in to make the top.

Put the filling in it. Tamp it down if there's a lot. Fold the top bits over, butter, repeat until you've made a little package inside your dish. Butter the top. Basically, butter everything like mad.

Pop that puppy in the oven, and wait until it's done. About an hour, but you'll know because it will be golden and lovely and crispy looking. And you'll enjoy it.

NOTE: there is no salt in this recipe because the feta is super-salty. You can add a little salt to the shallots if you like, but you don't really need it. Add greek seasoning or pepper if you want - it's all good.

NOTE2: You will not use all the phyllo. Not by a long-shot. But you can use it for lots of other things.

NOTE3: Do not worry if you tear the phyllo or if it looks a bit messy when you put the thing together. once it's baked up all golden and tastes like crispy butter...you won't be worrying about perfect corners.

*Sweating is where you cook something in fat over medium-low heat so it gets all golden and lovely but not brown. Usually, this is done with onions or another aromatic.