Spanakopita-ish

I love spanakopita. It is a fantastic snack, lunch, or dinner. Hubby thinks its a bit bland, so I haven`t made it in a while though.  I decided to yesterday, but with chicken, with the intent on having them for lunch the rest of the week. Unfortunately, the phyllo (filo) dough that I had put in the freezer did not survive. Apparently you can`t do that. You can with the blätterteig though. So, change of plans. I had to improvise, and it turned out quite well. I made tzatziki dip to go with it, and it was quite filling. Oh, and hubby thought this was really good!

What you need:
800 g frozen spinach, thawed and water squeezed out
500 g chicken, cooked and cut into bite size pieces
200 g feta cheese
2 eggs
2 Tbls butter, melted
2 packages blätterteig - puff pastry

One package was 6 rolls, though I could have made them a bit smaller and probably gotten 8. I had leftover filling, so you would do better with 2 packages.

For the dipping sauce, see my tzatziki recipe, but what you need is:
2 containers natural Greek yogurt
1 cucumber
1-2 cloves garlic
1 Tbls dried dill

First, thaw your spinach and cook your chicken. When everything is cooled and pulled apart into small pieces, add the feta and eggs. Mix well.

Melt the butter

Roll out your dough and cut it into 6-8 squares. Brush the edges of the dough with a little melted butter.

Put about 2 Tbls of filling across the edge and roll up, pinch the edges closed. Brush the top with a little of the butter

Bake at 200 C for about 20 minutes.  You can eat these hot, or once cooled, put them in the fridge, and they are great cold as well.

Serve with the dip.

Enjoy!

Your Cheese Needs Bread

Since we were making Fondue from scratch this year (I really think the ready made ones are fine, but a splash of Kirsch and a little fresh nutmeg would make it fantastic), I decided I would try making bread from scratch as well - though I did go buy a loaf just in case. And part way through, I thought I would need it. I found this recipe on Facebook through one of my groups, however, tracked it back to its source, here.
Making this bread was super simple. The only thing we noticed was that the cheese preferred to stick to the store bought bread better (and that may have been because I did not get it to rise properly)

What you need:

250 g flour
200 ml water
50 ml olive oil
10 g of fresh yeast (the cake yeast you can get in 42 g blocks)
1 tsp salt
extra flour for sprinkling.

Ok, the original recipe told me to mix everything together and let it sit. However, after reading about cake yeast, I think you need to do things a bit differently.

First, crumble the yeast and put it in a small bowl with your water - make sure it is warm, but not hot. Let it sit for 5 to 10 minutes until it starts to bubble.

Add the rest of the ingredients. Let sit for 20 minutes.

On baking paper, form the dough into a rectangle. Using a round pizza cutter - if you have one - dip it in flour so the edges do not stick, and cut the dough into a bite sized grid. Mine were a little on the large size and I would make them smaller next time.

not having used the proper yeast activation method..it still formed a rough rectangle

Sprinkle the top with a little water (or use a brush) and then sprinkle with a bit of flour.

Let sit for 10 minutes.


Cook at 210 for 20 minutes.

As you can see, it rose in the oven anyway

It was really good, even though I didn`t let the yeast sit out first. My dough didn`t actually rise like I imagined it would, so I will be making this again soon.