spanikopita, not veronica's finest work

Years ago, my last roommate and I threw a small holiday party where we prepared ethnic dishes from our motherlands. Dan is Greek and one of his delicious contributions was spanikopita. I remembered that they were incredible, but seemed like an awful lot of work. You had to squeeze spinach! And apparently phyllo is a very delicate ingredient, vulnerable to the drying properties of air. Jeez. Anyway, it's taken me many years to psych myself up to the challenge. But here I am.

So, I found and prepared this recipe.

Aside from the phyllo situation, spanikopita is refreshingly straightforward to prepare. Wilt spinach with some onions! Squeeze it!! Add crumbled feta and some other stuff! Piece of cake. The mixture that remains seems like it would be delicious as is. But since it had a raw egg in it I didn't test this theory.

The next step, of course, was to bring out this week's daunting compulsory ingredient: phyllo. As Jamie mentioned, phyllo (sometimes spelled filo - weird) is frozen. A stack comes rolled up in a plastic pack to protect it from the drying air. Once you open the pouch, you have to keep the stack covered with a damp tea towel.

The recipe calls for two sheets to be stacked, each brushed with melted butter. And I don't want to discourage anyone, but if you do this for 8 servings you end up going through an entire stick of butter. That really blew me away. Anyway, once your buttered filos are ready, you glob some of the filling onto the bottom center of the rectangle and fold the sides in. Voila! A filo tube ready to be flag-folded up and - eek! - buttered at every turn. The finished products are cool-looking, shiny triangles that take to freezing well, so I placed them straight onto a cookie sheet in the freezer.

I kept the last two out (the very last one was mini) and popped them into the oven. It was not until they came out that I realized something had gone awry: spanikopitas aren't puffy! WTF. And even though I bet I could've used even more spinach, the flavor was pretty solid.

If I had to guess what went wrong, I'd say maybe each triangle needed only one sheet of phyllo. I mean, you fold it into itself so many times you get plenty of layers. I think the additional sheet provided more space for air to get in and puff it up. This is just a guess, though. I'm no scientist.

Anyway, try cooking some spanikopitas! They keep well and are not nearly as scary to make as you think.

another farro & cabbage casserole!

Who knew there were so many (at least two) farro & cabbage casserole recipes?  For mine, I turned to gojee.com and it suggested these farro-stuffed, prosciutto-wrapped cabbage rolls.  Although the recipe was kind of vague in parts and there is absolutely no way that the end product could look like their photo (um, you put tomato sauce and mozzerella on top), it was delicious.  And due to my inferior cabbage rolling skills, much more casserole-y than I had originally envisioned.

I started out by trying to make Thomas Keller proud with a super-organized mise-en-place.

mise-en-place

Basically, this recipe involves a lot of chopping and waiting.  Once things were prepped, I got the farro going in one pot while blanching the cabbage leaves to make them "easy" to work with in another.  And this is where I had my biggest problem with the recipe.  The author claims to prefer working with the outer cabbage leaves for their color.  After deciding to use inner leaves as well (I really did not want to buy four cabbages), I quickly learned that they are difficult to peel off and get wonky and cook much quicker than the outer leaves.  So when it came time to roll them, they were kind of a mess.  If I make this again (and I think I will--tasty!), I think that I'll turn to another source to better learn the fine art of cabbage rolling.

outer leaf - piece of cake!

After stuffing and rolling and topping, the casserole went in the oven for 35 minutes and came out delicious.  And the recipe provided enough food for K & I to get 4 meals out of it (without suffering farro casserole fatigue).

before

after

the best meal veronica probably won't make again

For this week's farro challenge I wanted to make something I saw a Top Cheftestant cook many seasons ago: farrotto. I think that is a stupid word, but since I'm a fan of both risotto and farro, I decided to try it anyway.

After taking an inventory of my foods and scouring the internet, I chose to prepare farro risotto with kale and roasted acorn squash.

Even though the dish was very delicious I doubt I'll ever make it again. It took SO long to cook, I thought I would pass out from hunger! Basically, you have to a) peel/chop/roast an acorn squash, b) boil water and blanch some kale, c) season and roast farro, d) chop aromatics, and, finally - ha! - e) cook the farro in a risotto-like fashion. I'd say it took me about an hour and a half to get to step (e) and then about an hour to stand around like a chump, ladling broth into the cooking farro.

Once the farro(tto) was cooked, I added all the other prepped components and tossed around with some nice parmesan and butter. Boom, finally. And for all my wah-wah-ing, it really was very delicious.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to call it farro risotto, though. Risotto calls to mind that beautiful starchy-creamy business that make great risottos great. Farro doesn't really bleed much of its starchiness, so in the end this dish relies on butter and cheese to mimic that texture. And while it was tasty, it was definitely not risotto. Two days later, though, I would come to appreciate this.

Risotto doesn't keep well. That starchy-creamy whatever just gets all gelatinous and nasty. This is apparently not an issue with farrotto. For brunch a couple of days later I heated up the little I had left over and dropped a poached egg on top. I am a genius!

Getting two excellent meals out of this dish almost makes up for all the time spent making it. Almost.

Raku: Farro Casserole

I found a recipe for a nice-sounding cabbage casserole.

Yes, it included heavy cream, most of a stick of butter, and half a pound of cheese, but soooo healthy aside from that... Still my conscience was pricking me, so I decided to make some substitutions - a lot less butter  in exchange for a little olive oil, milk mixed in with the heavy cream. I let the cheese stand, since a lady's got to have standards. While I was being so wonderfully inventive, I replaced the rice in the recipe with farro. Why not?

This was a mistake. The resulting dish looked kind of cute while in the pyrex, but it was a (hot) mess out of it. Way too much liquid! The rice that should have soaked it all up had been replaced (by some fool) for farro. All in the name of laziness (couldn't go to the store to buy rice) and health (this will be the death of me). Oh well. The flavor wasn't bad, so I'll probably try it again. But next time I'll go true-to-recipe or go home.

Johanna: Also Thanksgiving Bread Pudding

Like Jamie, I could not find a loaf of brioche!  In Beverly Hills!  I don't know why, but I assumed that in Beverly Hills, they sell everything you could ever possibly need to be a fancy person.  And a loaf of brioche is definitely one of those things.*

The bread pudding was super simple to make.  The leeks smelled amazing while they were getting all nice and melty on the stove (though mine did brown a lot and I was wondering if that was supposed to happen?).

I did cut the crusts off the bread (wound up using 1.5 loaves of French country white in lieu of the brioche) and just used the soft innards.  After toasting the bread in the oven, beating the eggs and mixing all of the fatty dairy, I composed the pudding.  I was a bit concerned that I had too much bread.  I know that some should be poking out of the custard, but I wondered if using a non-buttery bread could lead to dryness? 

And because of this concern about drying out, I pulled the bread pudding out of the oven about a half hour early.  It was so puffy and tall right out of the oven and then it imploded (albeit, rather gently).  Wah.  Nonetheless, K's dad proclaimed it to be the most beautiful bread pudding he'd ever seen (doubt it, but I'll take it) and our fellow Thanksgiving diners seemed to enjoy it thoroughly and offered up their compliments.  Though I do think that the top was slightly dry.

* I could find brioche rolls, no problem, but I was not about to buy a million of them at $3 a piece, or however much they cost at Bristol Farms.

Johanna: I Love Fried Bread

After last week's fiasco re: duck legs, it was an absolute joy to be able to find everything for this recipe so easily.  Asparagus, check!  Country loaf, check!  Prosciutto, check (I mean, srsly, my local grocery shop is called Romeo & Cesare's)!  And I even got my hands on some of those beautiful blue eggs with the brilliantly yellow yolks that I love so very much.  Everything fell into place so nicely this week.  No more classed-up Sandra Lee from me.

The trick about the asparagus, as Veronica mentioned in her post, really is quite fantastic.  I always just grab my paring knife and chop off what looks like it might be unpalatable.  This bending and snapping thing is a much more reliable (and easy!) method.

The asparagus grilled up nicely (though the lack of hood above our oven always causes the kitchen to get uber-smoky when we break out the grill/griddle) while I looked on in glee as the bread got nice and fried.  (We've made croutons before, but just with olive oil...so this was a little disconcerting / delicious).

My poached eggs were tasty, but ghosty.  I'm really hoping that I'll get better at it.  It's just so gross seeing threads of egg white floating around in a pot of vinegared water.

Final verdict: YUM!  Kamran and I didn't even bother to take our own portions off of the serving dish.  We just dove right in.

Veronica : Adventures in Poaching

Menu: Grilled asparagus with poached eggs, prosciutto, and torn garlic croutons

I thought that the Grilled Asparagus would be an nice weeknight recipe. Convenient, too, as I happened to have a handsome bunch of asparagus in my refrigerator. I tried really hard this time to get my mise-en-place, but I just couldn't. I have only enough counter space in my kitchen to accommodate my smallish cutting board and one, maybe two, receptacles for recently chopped items. I have no place to put tiny bowls, etc. Apologies to the team.

ANYWAY, skinny asparagus is one of my favorite veges and Mr. Keller mentions a helpful kitchen tip that I've lived by for awhile: slowly bend an asparagus stalk and where it snaps is where you should trim. All stalks will be tender and not at all woody that way. Brills! Next I oiled the little stalks and seasoned with coarse black pepper and kosher salt.

I left them to hang out on the parchment for a bit while I saw to the torn croutons. It all started very promising. I had a nice roll that I tore into

bite sized chunks. I slowly sauteed several garlic cloves to impart their tastiness into some oil. But then. Then I tossed the bread in the oil, ADDED BUTTER, and watched the bread soak it up. Every. Single. Drop. As the croutons slowly browned and eventually crisped, my horror morphed into exhilaration. They looked (and smelled) really good.

The last couple of steps in the process were pretty simple. The asparagus just needed to be grilled for a couple of minutes on each side, which was the perfect amount of time for me to also poach the eggs. When I dropped my first egg into the pot, I was immediately reminded of how I hate poaching eggs. I'm not good at it: They always end up so ugly, the whites all shredded up and ghostly.

all together now

your brain in a measuring cup

With all the parts now prepared, I was able to compose my plate. A little prosciutto here. A couple of piles of asparagus there. Strategically-placed eggs. Croutons everywhere! I ground up a little bit of extra black pepper on top because it always looks nice and I love black pepper. I was supposed to drizzle olive oil and balsamic vinegar on top of everything, but the dish did not need the oil and I don't really love balsamic. Also, I forgot. It did feel pretty fatty overall, so maybe some acid would have helped. If I make it again, I'll try not to forget the vinegar.

zero points for plating

All in all, there were a lot of components, but each of them reasonably simple to put together. Tasty, but very (too?) rich. I expect I'll make it again, but probably in a smaller portion as a starter (at a dinner party) or something. It was a little too decadent to have as an entree.

Unrelated Item:

Stars, they're just like Bearded Ladies

While in line at the deli counter to get prosciutto, I was behind SNL alum Rachel Dratch and her new baby. She ordered pancetta. Italian cured meats for all!