Best Food Writing 2013 (42 page)

       
1. I am a big boy. I can handle this sort of trauma like a champ.

       
2. I am an able cook and recipe developer. I should make my own damned
spanakotiropita
if I can't handle the fact that they aren't going to be made available to me by my restaurant and the small army of prep cooks therein.

       
3. If I make my own, I can put whatever I like into them and make them whatever shape I want them to be. I can be the master of my own Greek pie destiny.

And with that realization came a great relief. And, I think, a great recipe.

Hortotiropita or, in American English, Greens and Cheese Phyllo Pies

       
The great thing about phyllo pies is that you can fill them with anything the voices in your own head tell you to. Go ahead and be inspired: lamb, greens, lemon curd, cement, whatever. Listen to your voices.

           
You can also shape them however you like. In this case I have abandoned the folded-flag look of traditional pies and replaced it with the shape of my favorite Greek dessert,
galaktoboureko
, or, in Chinese terms, an egg roll.

           
This recipe, which is suited to my particular tastes and needs, is merely a guideline. All that matters is that you love the taste of your own filling. Interpret that last sentence however you wish.

Makes about a dozen pastries.

           
3 bunches chard

           
1 bunch mustard greens

           
2 bunches of beet greens, ripped from six large golden beets

           
2 leeks, sliced into manageable, but not tiny bits

           
2 bunches of scallions, sliced the same way as the leeks

           
3 tablespoons of butter for sautéing the leeks and scallions

           
¼ teaspoon of salt

           
½
teaspoon ground black pepper

           
1 tablespoon Aleppo pepper

           
10 ounces Greek feta, crumbled.

           
1 cup grated Parmesan

           
4 Tablespoons finely chopped dill.

           
1 package of phyllo dough

           
12 tablespoons of melted butter with which to brush the phyllo sheets.

           
For Garnish
(which is purely optional, as is pretty much everything else)

           
3 teaspoons of sesame seeds

           
1 teaspoon fennel seed

           
1. Clean your greens, remove their stocks and stems, and roughly chop. Set aside.

           
2. Toss 3 tablespoons of butter into the bottom of a large stockpot or a very large sauté pan and melt over medium heat. Add the leeks and scallions, moving them about the bottom of the cooking vessel until they are soft and vaguely translucent. The idea is not to brown them, but rather to weaken their resolve. Add the chopped greens a handful or two at a time, stirring them about with tongs or a large wooden spoon to wilt them/coat them with the butter and warm the leeks and scallions. Repeat this action until all the greens have found their way in. Cover and cook on a medium-low flame, stirring and tossing occasionally until all the leaves are wilted. The contents of the pot will have reduced by about 2/3 their original volume (about 7 to 8 minutes). I hope you do not find this at all alarming.

           
Do not overcook. Nothing horrifying will happen if they do, it's just that I want you to be mindful of the fact that the greens will be cooked further when eventually wrapped in phyllo and shoved into a hot oven.

           
Empty the hot, flabby greens into a colander which, if you are wise, will be strategically placed into your sink. Drain well, squeeze as much liquid out of them as possible without straining yourself or traumatizing the steaming vegetation. If you are the type of person who enjoys such things, reserve the greens, sweat/liquid/unwanted moisture, let cool, and drink.

           
Spread the strangled greens into a large casserole dish and let cool to room temperature. You may also transfer the greens to a large bowl, but they will take much longer to cool if you choose to do so.

           
3. When the greens have sufficiently cooled, add the salt, pepper, Aleppo pepper, feta, Parmesan, and dill. Combine well.

           
At this point, I prefer to transfer the mixture to a smaller
vessel, cover it tightly, and refrigerate it until I am ready to use it. Making this a day in advance of baking the pastries is a very good thing. The flavors are more prone to mingle that way.

           
4. About an hour before you wish to assemble your
hortotiropita
heat your oven to 450°F and place a rack to the upper third of the oven. Remove both the phyllo and the filling mixture from the refrigerator and let them warm up to the idea of their impending intimacy (room temperature). During this time, you may also wish to melt the butter. (Some people insist upon using only clarified butter for brushing onto their phyllo. I say “bravo” to them, but I find it an unnecessary waste of time. I can think of so many other ways of squandering whatever time I have left on this planet. Very few of them have anything to do with melting butter.)

           
5. Make certain you have a large enough work surface to accommodate a) your unfolded phyllo, b) a cutting board or prep space wide and long enough to give the phyllo you are working with enough room to manuever, c) a half-sheet pan
lined with foil or parchment
(which will comfortably hold twelve pastries), and d) a place for your bowl of filling and melted butter, respectively.

           
6. Place a clean kitchen towel over the surface of the space where you would like your phyllo unfurled. Carefully unpackage said Greek pastry sheets and lay them flat over the towel with a combination of care and confidence. Lay a second clean towel over the phyllo sheets to prevent them from drying out. Which happens much sooner than one might think it would. I find that giving the top towel a very light mist of water from a spray bottle helps. However, I do not recommend over-moistening, because that would be extremely unfortunate for both the phyllo and the person attempting to manipulate the phyllo. Rather, pretend you are about to iron out a subtle wrinkle from this top towel. A few, short mists. If you are unfamiliar with the subtleties of ironing, you may wish to skip this step and just work as quickly as possible.

           
7. To assemble the pies, place one sheet of phyllo onto your work space and brush with butter from the center and work your brushstrokes to the outside edges. Place 85 grams of filling
(yours do not have to be 85 grams, but I do recommend weighing out your filling to whatever amount pleases you to get uniform results) in the left-hand center of the pastry sheet, about 2 inches away from the edge.

           
Fold the bottom of the sheet up to the center, fold the top down to the center until the length of your pastry is the one you desire. Mine happens to be the approximate length of my iPhone. Give a light brushing of butter to the newly exposed surface. Roll the pastry over until you have reached the end. Place flap-side down onto the awaiting sheet pan. Repeat until you have used up all of your filling.

           
8.
Take the tip of a small knife and pierce each pie to its foundation five times.
I cannot stress how important having steam vents is. I took a batch of these to a party this summer, became distracted by cocktail-wielding friends, and forgot all about piercing. Most of them exploded. However, they were still delicious.

           
9. Brush the tops of your pies with more butter and then pop into the oven to bake for 8 minutes. After 8 minutes have elapsed, rotate the sheet pan, sprinkle the pies with the sesame and fennel seeds, then return to the oven for about 5 more minutes or until the pastry is golden brown. Remove from the oven and let cool for a few minutes because burning-hot cheese is an unpleasant sensation to one's mouth. Unless, of course, one is mentally prepared for it, as in the case of
saganaki
.

           
Serve warm with a beer, some friends, a little ouzo. Whatever you wish to serve them with, just be certain one of those things is a napkin–these are flaky little bastards.

*
The
spanakotiropita
did, in fact, return to our restaurant menu as I hoped and prayed they would. It's almost enough to make one believe in the power of prayer.

 

 

L
OBSTER
L
ESSONS

By Aleksandra Crapanzano

From
The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learn to Eat

Screenwriter and food essayist Aleksandra Crapanzano comes by her passion for cooking honestly, having grown up in a gourmet-loving household in Paris and New York. Imagine then her frustration, facing a beach house sojourn with a quirky in-law mired in a serious food rut.

R
ituals are at once burdens and gifts; this is what makes them worth doing, and having, and keeping. It was a remarkable old woman who taught me this lesson—and how, along the way, not to cook a lobster—and I will never forget it.

John and I had been together a year. I had met his parents and he'd met mine. We had moved in together, traveled together, eaten great meals together, but we had not yet settled into (how could we have?) any enduring rituals. Then when summer arrived, it was time to get serious. Serious, for John, meant introducing me to a tiny beach cottage on the east coast of Nantucket, where he'd spent at least a part of every summer of his life; serious meant our spending a few weeks there with his permanent Other Woman, his great-aunt Margaret, whose cottage it was.

Eighty-two years old and a legend in children's book publishing, Margaret, John had warned me, was a creature of habit. To be precise, dietary habit. I'd already heard tales of her spartan daily regimen, which consisted largely of grapefruit (three), skim milk (two tall glasses), and a tuna-fish sandwich. Dinner was, without variation
and without fail, a cold chicken leg (boiled), two red potatoes (also boiled), and a pile of grayish green beans (ditto). I was twenty-one that summer, already something of a food snob, and spartan wasn't really in my repertoire.

The first sign of a new world order came on the day we were supposed to pick Margaret up at the ferry terminal. John, who had never before shown the least interest in cooking, suddenly declared, in the voice of an anxious sergeant, that he knew what his aunt liked to eat and how she liked to eat it—and that while we were all cohabiting, he would take charge of the meals, if that was all right with me. I watched in horror as he filled an entire shopping cart at the A&P with water-packed tuna and low-fat mayonnaise. When I reached for a head of garlic, he simply shook his head in dismay, sensing perhaps the inevitable clash of palates in two of the women he loved best. But it was the margarine that almost brought our relationship to an early end. It would be months before we again crossed the threshold of a supermarket together.

From that first dinner with Margaret in her cottage, I remember her smiling at me as the three of us clinked glasses over the table, making me feel wonderfully welcome. But the food itself? Let's just say that, as with any real trauma, the details are buried deep in my psyche.

The following day, I walked up from the beach to find John waiting for me in Margaret's cherry-red 1967 Buick convertible. “Let's go get the lobsters,” he called out over the noisy engine. This was promising. I hopped in. Lobsters, corn on the cob, and baked potatoes: It would be messy and buttery and fun. That evening, I was digging out an old T-shirt, knowing I'd be sprayed and stained by dinner's end, when I looked up and caught sight of John through the window. He was stumbling up from the ocean, through the beach grass, weighted down by an enormous black lobster pot, the water sloshing out by the gallon and running down his legs. As he came up the porch steps, I asked him what he was doing. “If you want your lobsters to taste of the ocean, you have to cook them in ocean water,” he explained. Margaret, I learned, had been cooking lobsters this way all her life, as had her parents. It was hard to think of refuting the idea, even when John described the hours and boxes of Brillo it would take to scrub the pot clean.