another recipe from our old website – too good to waste!
Ingredients:
2 lb spinach or 1lb each spinach and whites of leeks
2 bunches spring onions
2 oz fresh herbs: parsley, dill, coriander are ideal
4 oz butter or use good olive oil
2 onions finely chopped
2 large eggs
4 oz feta cheese, crumbled
Filo pastry
Salt and pepper
Method:
Wash and chop the spinach, spring onions and herbs (you can do this in a food processor), sprinkle them with a tablespoon of salt and leave for 20 minutes.
Heat three tablespoons oil or 3 oz butter and gently fry the onion. When they are reduced, add the leeks, if you are using them, and cook for 5 minutes or so.
Squeeze the salted, chopped greens with your hands to get rid of as much moisture as possible – this is important because otherwise you’ll have a runny pie.
In a large bowl combine the greens, the onion mixture, the feta and the beaten eggs and add some black pepper. It shouldn’t need salt. Mix well.
Now for the filo pastry trick. If you are using butter, melt it gently. If you use oil, have it to hand in a cup. Get a pastry brush and wet a tea towel to cover the pastry, which will otherwise dry quickly in the air as soon as the packet is opened.
Oil the base of an oven-proof dish or baking tin (or two). Lay one sheet of filo pastry on the bottom of your chosen dish, allowing the excess to overhang the edge and brush all over with melted oil/butter. Take another sheet and lay it alongside the first, overlapping if necessary so that the base of the dish is covered, and brush that with oil too. You are aiming for four or five layers deep on the bottom, each layer brushed with oil. Keep the unused pastry covered with the tea towel – unless you are very quick. It really isn’t as hard, or fiddly, as it sounds.
Now place the spinach filling in the pie and top it with four or five more layers of filo pastry, as before. Oil the final layer, trim the excess pastry with scissors and tuck it in at the edges and corners and oil it as well.
Bake for 40 minutes at 180/ 350/Gas no 4. Serve warm, or cool.