Oh Me, Oh My - Love That Feta Pie!
Wild Garlic Spanakopita, and why "great ingredients" can do one...
Hi folks. Welcome to another edition of What’s That You’re Cooking, Thea? - a recipe newsletter with occasional extras! This week we’re cooking Wild Garlic Spanakopita.
There will be those who can’t wait to see the back of wild garlic, and I respect them. It’s not exactly easy to come by amongst the tower blocks and concrete of the big smoke; and perhaps some of you find the thought of being labelled a forager a wee bit off-putting. But if you take a trip out to a shady copse, maybe in Kent, Suffolk, or even Sydenham Woods or Epping Forest, you might just find some. And there’s nothing quite like the feeling of FREE FOOD. If you can’t be arsed or can’t find any where you live, just use spinach in its place in this recipe. (You might want to sweat a clove of garlic at the start of the recipe too).
Wild Garlic Spanakopita
My spanakopita tends to be quite deep on account of the size of my baking dish (which is about 24cm long) AND because I like a pie to be tall and mighty, but make yours in a longer tray if you’d prefer it to be a bit flatter.
Wild garlic stan or not, I hope you enjoy this recipe. And don’t worry, very soon everyone will shut up about the stuff for another year.
Serves 6
500g wild garlic or spinach leaves, washed and roughly chopped
2 packets of feta
6 spring onions, finely chopped
2 eggs
Small bunch of dill, finely chopped
1 tsp dried mint/oregano (optional)
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
A grating of nutmeg
Salt and pepper
Filo pastry 1 x packet
60g butter, melted
Olive oil
Sesame seeds/urfa chilli flakes/Aleppo chilli flakes to decorate (optional)
Turn your oven on to 200°c. Sautée the spring onions in a pan in a 2 tbsp olive oil for a couple of minutes. Add your chopped spinach or wild garlic leaves and gently cook until just wilted (roughly 2 minutes). Put it in a large bowl to cool it down.
Once cool, squeeze out any liquid that is released. Add in your fresh dill (or parsley), dried mint/oregano, and crumble in all the feta. Season with the zest and juice of a lemon, a grating of nutmeg, a little salt and plenty of pepper. Add the eggs then mix very well.
Now butter your baking/pie dish and start building your spanakopita, by adding in a sheet of filo at a time brushing with melted butter between each sheet. I usually do 8-10 sheets on the bottom, then fill the pie, and top with 8 or so more buttered sheets.
Scrunch and fold the excess pastry on top of itself to seal in a slightly ruffled pattern, then brush lots of butter/olive oil on top and sprinkle with sesame seeds/salt/urfa chilli flakes or all three.
I’ve tried it both ways, and I have now decided I like to slice the spanakopita into 6 slices before baking, as it makes it easier and less flaky to serve up later. But if you’d prefer to slice at your table, do it!
Bake in the oven for around 45-55 minutes until golden and crisp, then allow to cool for at least 10 minutes before serving. I like to serve with lemony greek potatoes (recipe here), pickled chillies, and a feta-less Greek salad or similar.
To Caffs not cafes on Instagram
Most of you will know about this mesmerising Instagram page, but if you didn’t, now you do. Isaac Rangaswami’s descriptions of London’s culinary relics of a semi-bygone era are a joy to read. From sandwich bars to dosa joints, he highlights the best examples of this city’s food culture, that we should all work to keep alive. By eating, so that’s good! Isaac is using Instagram to provide a service to us all and I salute him.
Why declaring the importance of ‘great ingredients’ isn’t the titbit you think it is
Perhaps this is a bit rich from me, having just dumped another wild garlic recipe on the world, but allow me this moment to rant…
There’s a lot of people professing their devotion to “great ingredients” lately. It feels like the online recipe production world think they’ve found the key to good cooking - and apparently it isn’t supermarket pasta (don’t you even dare…). I’d like to stop hearing such meaningless drivel, which seems to completely overlook our current cost-of-living crisis, the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
“Great ingredients” do not a good cook make, and they aren’t the secret path to ‘simple honest cooking’ that some people seem to think they are. Great ingredients cost a fortune - we can’t all afford to go and spend £4 on 3 slices of mortadella, or a nice tomato and pretend we are living like Italian peasants in 1902, subsisting on ‘provisions’ not mere groceries. Let’s see how good a cook such people are when they’re using semi-ripe 75p tomatoes, or a bowl of £1 courgettes from the market, heavy with water and not much else. Great ingredients don’t half tot up. As a wise man once said, you can take your ‘EVOO’ and shove it...
That man was me.
SEE YOU NEXT TIME!
NEXT MONTH: it’s a Special Edition taco bonanza.