Spinach easy, spinach not so

Yesterday's post on spinach got some attention. It seems that spinach is a favorite of a lot of people, but our y ounguns are not among those. The more things change.... So rather than move onto another veggie or fruit and coming back to spinach in the future, I want to address a couple more recipes with this cool weather green.

The first is an easy one: creamed spinach. One of the interesting, somewhat amusing things about cooking, is that you will sometimes find a dish described with food words, that have nothing to do with the ingredients. Classic creamed spinach, for example, has no cream in it. I HAVE had it with cream, but the resulting dish was so rich that I could only handle 2 or 3 spoonfuls of it. If your system can handle it, then by all means, replace the milk in the following recipe with cream, but for heavens sake, eat smaller portions.

Now, I'm not giving precise amounts here for anything but the flour and butter. For the rest, you'll have to play with what you would like your ratio of "spinach to white sauce" to be. I prefer more spinach than sauce, but if you go to a good steakhouse, for example, the ratio is probably going to be on the order of 1 part spinach to 2 parts of white sauce. It really is all up to you.

First, prepare the spinach in the way I describe for the prior entry, but don't add the oil, currants or pine nuts. Just put it aside and let it cool, while you make the white sauce. Prepare as much spinach as you want. Keep in mind, however, that creamed spinach is much more filling than spinach, so if you're using it as a side dish, you'll want less.

While the spinach is cooling, make the white sauce. We've done this before, but let's do it again. Melt two tablespoons of butter, unsalted preferred, in a big heavy pan. Then add two tablespoons of flour to the butter, and whisk it, over low heat. You will probably get clots and clumps, but that's okay. Have some milk ready. I use whole milk, but 2% is fine, and I THINK 1% is also ok, but I can't vouch for it. DONT use skim milk. If you're going to, make the Roman/Sicilian spinach instead.

Some recipes call for you to warm the milk before this step. I have never found it necessary, but I have a pretty fast whisking hand (CAREFUL YOU PIGS). If you feel slightly clumsy in the kitchen, maybe you do want to warm it. With the heat on low, start gradually pouring milk into the flour and butter mixture. The flour will dissolve into the milk, and you will eventually see a thickening. Start with 1.5 -2 cups of milk. When it thickens, stop whisking and let it heat for a couple of minutes at low heat. It may thicken some more, and then see if it's too thick for you (it won't be too thin). If it is, then add more milk, but DO keep in mind that the spinach is going to loosen it, because of its inherent water.

When you have the sauce to the thickness you like, you need to season it. Salt is a must. Some people require white pepper, which I find to be tasteless dust, but if it's in your flavor palette, add it. Finally, for many people, myself included, a good scraping of fresh nutmeg is essential. There is a synergy between milk and nutmeg, and there is also one between nutmeg and spinach. Use it . (By the way, did you know that you can get a cheap, albeit nasty high, by stirring a tablespoon of nutmeg into a half cup of milk and drinking it down? It's true. But just about every "trip" on this combination is reported to be a bad one. Proceed with caution.)

Ok, after you've gone on your magical mystery tour, get to that spinach. Squeeze it and squeeze it HARD. Get that water out of it. Then squeeze it again. Then get out a knife and chop it roughly. Stir itinto the cream sauce, and you're done.

Or are you? If you REALLY want to push this to a level of sickening excess (nuthin wrong with that), put that creamed spinach into a buttered dish, dot it with butter or grated cheese, or both, and run it under the broiler for a minute or two. Now, you're talking a VERY serious side dish that really sounds more like lunch to me. But it's up to you. The spinach becomes assertive, and you will taste it. It comes down to a question of whether or not you want to spend those calories.

Ok, now to something more challenging. Some would say that spanokopita is the apotheosis of spinach cooking (if you don't know what apotheosis means, look it up. Then use it in three sentences today NOT involving spinach. Then the word is yours forever. It's a good word).

Spanokopita is one of the "mainstays' of hearty vegetarian cooking. It's one of the dishes that is the root cause of the lament "I don't understand why I'm so FAT. I'm a VEGETARIAN." Well, it uses butter. LOTS of butter. Eggs, cheese and spinach. Not the equivalent of a green salad with lemon juice, lemme tell you. But it sure is good.

Something that I have found about this dish is that it does not keep well. Every time I've reheated spanokopita, I have found that it lost its lovely crispiness. So when you make this, plan on having some people over. It's a good dish to share.

You will need phyllo dough, which scares a lot of people. Let me assure you, first of all, that we are NOT going to make phyllo dough here. Annalena has in fact made it twice. Both times, she cursed like a drunken nun. Buy the stuff. It's better than you can make, unless you're an older Greek woman who learned from her mother.
Another thing about phyllo dough. After you make this recipe, you will have lots left. You will be tempted to save it "for another day." Don't. You wont' use it. I know you won't. It will sit in your fridge, taking up space, getting dry and useless, and then you'll toss it. So either find another recipe for phyllo, or bite the bullet and toss it.

You can use frozen spinach for this, if you like. I prefer to do it fresh. You start with a hefty two pounds of fresh spinach - on the stem- and prep it like in the first spinach recipe. Again, cook it like you would without the currants and pine nuts. Put it aside while you prep the other ingredients.

The other ingredients are a pound of feta cheese. Shop around for this. There are GOOD feta cheeses out there. The stuff in your supermarket is NOT good feta cheese. You also need a pound of a soft white cheese. When I learned how to make it, we used something called "pot cheese" or cottage cheese. That will work, but now, I use ricotta, for a little cross cultural meditteranean "thang" You will also need a good handful of chopped parsley, and six large eggs. Mix all of this together in a bowl, stir it well, and season it with salt and pepper.

Optionally, you can chop up a bunch of scallions, and either cook them in olive oil before adding them to the mix, or you can add them raw. I leave them out. Finally, do the squeeze trick with the spinach, chop it, and add it to the cheese mixture.

Now, melt two sticks of unsalted butter. You're going to use it ALL. Get a big baking sheet, and brush it with melted butter (By the way, if you don't have a brush in your kitchen, get one. Get one with natural fibers. You will never regret it). After you brush the butter on the sheet, start laying down phyllo sheets. Probably, they're going to tear. Don't worry about it. Traditionally, you butter each sheet as you put it down. I don't do this, because I don't find it necessary. I DO butter after every SECOND sheet, though, and I continue for ten sheets worth of phyllo. If it isn't precisely ten, don't worry. And as you do this, you will see that the layering effect essentially covers all of the tears that may have resulted.

After you have ten sheets down, dump your filling on it, and spread it out all over the phyllo, nice and even. Then repeat the process, with the same number of sheets, and the butter trick. After this is done, try to tuck the top layer of phyllo down at the ends so that it conjoins the bottom layer. Again, it's not critical to do this precisely, but you do want to try to contain the filling. Finally, what you do is take a sharp knife and score the phyllo all over, down to the spinach, and pour whatever remaining butter you have over it.

Put this into the oven, at 350, for 30-40 minutes, or until you see a nice brown color on the top.

This needs to sit a bit before you eat it, because the filling is very soft. Some say you can cut into it in as little as five minutes. I say a half hour is right.

You really don't want more than a green salad or if it's high season, a tomato salad with this. Get some dry white wine, a Greek wine if you are lucky enough to have one, and celebrate, because this IS a celebratory dish. It's big, it's rich, it's festive. We're getting to holiday season, and what better way to celebrate your friends than with a dish that is both "familiar" and "exotic," and something that I bet they haven't had in a long, LONG time.