Gougere Aux Epinards & Grilled Spinach and Ricotta Turnover

     This pizza night was a battle of the spinach pie recipes!  It's funny how that happens without planning.  My whole reason for using two books instead of two recipes from one book is that most cookbooks group similar recipes together, and I thought that by using two separate books would solve that.  I was okay with it, though.  Sometimes it is nice to compare two similar recipes.  It helps give me ideas for different preparations of a particular food.  Having two similar recipes side by side can be fun - you can compare and contrast the two styles and what the different preparations do for the flavor.
     I bought some fresh spinach and some frozen.  Since the recipe for the turnover called for precooked spinach, squeezed dry, I figured I could save the cooking process and just use the frozen spinach.  I think I could have done the same for the Gougere, but I hadn't read through the entire recipe before building my grocery list for the week, so that recipe was going to get fresh spinach, steamed.  I did it in the microwave.  I threw the leaves in a bowl, covered the bowl with saran wrap and nuked it for about 3 minutes.  The leaves were just barely steamed, and the volume had reduced by half.  If it is a matter of ease of preparation, I think the two options are equal.  Steaming in the microwave is quick and easy, as is thawing and squeezing.  However, the frozen option is much cheaper.  The fresh spinach was $1.99 for a 9oz bag, and I used one and two-thirds of a second one to get my one pound for the Gougere.  For the turnover, I used one 10oz package, which was less than a dollar.  Even if I used enough of the frozen spinach to equal 16oz, there would still be a significant savings, especially if you actually de-stem all of the fresh spinach, which I didn't do.
     Anyway, I wanted to start on the slow-simmered sauce first, because it takes a long time to make.
    
I didn't have any tomato sauce on hand, and I hadn't thought about making this sauce when I made my grocery list.  Also, I feel kind of weird about buying tomato products when I have half a freezer full of tomatoes from my recently-deceased garden.  So I pulled a bag of tomatoes out for the sauce.  I threw the entire bag into the Vitamix and pureed them until they were smooth.  Voila!  Tomato sauce!

    I think that there was probably a little more moisture content in my "sauce" than a regular can of tomato sauce, because it seemed really thin.  It had been so long since I had made this sauce, that I couldn't remember exactly the consistency, so I wasn't sure if this was how it should be or not.  I put the pot on the back burner and let it bubble away while I worked on the sauce for the Gougere.

     I used my new chopper contraption for the onions, and it was slick.  I used the slicing blade on the onions first, then put the perfect slices back into the chopper with the criss-cross blade in, and it produced the most beautifully uniform squares of onion I have ever seen.  I put the slicing blade back in and did the mushrooms.  I started with them caps down in the "v" of the slice.  After I released the "pusher", the blade came out with it, the mushroom still dangling from its teeth.  I tried the mushrooms in several different positions and found that the only way the blade would stay in place was if the mushroom was sideways on the blade.  Placed in the guillotine in other directions, it still sliced them evenly and thinly, but it was just annoying to have to keep putting the blade back in. 

     I sauteed the onions and mushrooms and put them aside.  I started the roux, following the directions, and I cooked it for four minutes, as it indicated, but I think it was a bit too long.  The resulting paste was very brown.  It didn't smell like it was burned or anything, so I continued on.  I added the half and half a little at a time, and by the time I had added all of it, the sauce was very thick.  I quickly slid the pan off of the burner and added the mushroom-onion mixture back in.  It looked like a mushroom gravy.

     I added it to the steamed spinach, and it certainly brightened up the color scheme.

     I checked on my sauce.  It had been about an hour.  I expected some reduction, but it didn't look like that was happening.  From looking at the sides of the pan, I could tell that the level of the sauce had gone down, but the sauce itself was still very thin. 

     My sauce took about four hours to reach a consistency I felt good about.  I was half asleep by the time it was cool enough to place in the refrigerator for the night.   

     When Jennifer arrived on Thursday, I had her pick out and make us drinks.

     I had laid out all of the ingredients for the crust of the Gougere in the order that we were going to need them.  I set Pam on that task of making that while I rolled out the crust for the turnover.  She was so fast at whisking the butter and flour together, you could scarcely see her hands.

     Once she combined the eggs with the dough, she started putting it in the prepared pan.

     Jennifer caught her sampling the dough and asked how it was.  She said it was bland.  She spread the dough out, and we put it in the oven to do its thing.

     Meanwhile, I combined the frozen spinach, the slow-simmered sauce, and the ricotta.  All of the remaining ingredients for the turnover pizza were combined in one bowl.  Once it was all mixed, I couldn't even tell that there was tomato sauce in the mix.  The tricky part came when it was time to fill the turnover.  There was quite a lot of goo in comparison to the size of the turnover dough.     I had to really stretch the dough to get it together the great mound of filling.  I made an extra effort to crimp the edges closed, since the last turnover leaked all over the inside of my grill.  I wondered, though, if the reason it came open was because there was no vent for when the inside ingredients get all steamy.  I thought about putting some vents in, but then it would still leak out and into the grill.  In the end, I just wet the edges and crimped them as well as I could before grilling.

     When the twenty minute stint in the oven for the Gourge was done, we pulled it out.  It didn't look like I had expected.  I thought it would have puffed completely up - much like a popover.  It looked more like a high-sided wrinkly quiche.

     The next step was to pour the mushroom, spinach, cream mixture over the top and cover with tomatoes.  I actually still had a couple of heirloom tomatoes from the garden that hadn't rotted or molded, so I used one of those. 

     The next task was to cover this with slices of Swiss cheese.  I had only purchased shredded cheese, so I grabbed the bag of Swiss.  I thought it was odd, at the time, that I had placed the cheese over by the crust ingredients instead of by the filling ingredients.  However, I only thought about it for a minute before pressing on.  I realized later, that we were supposed to put 2 cups of cheese in the crust.  Even if I had realized this at this point, it was still too late now that the crust had already been cooked.   I placed the assembled dish into the oven and went to check on my turnover.

     I had kept the grill at medium this time, having learned my lesson last week about putting the grill on too high.  I think my theory about why the turnover's seal was breaking proved correct.  This turnover was opening like a clam.

     Fortunately, this filling wasn't as juicy as the ham one was.  The side of the turnover was opening, but the filling stayed inside for the most part.  I did lose a little down the grates when I flipped it, but what can you do?
     The crust was so crispy, it made it a little difficult to cut the turnover.  We needed 7 pieces, since there were seven of us.  Jonah and Gracie probably wouldn't eat it, but we still had to make a portion for each of them just in case.   When I brought the blade down onto the turnover, the filling squished out the open ends.

     The Gougere looked beautiful when I took it out of the oven.  The cheese was evenly browned and the spinach-mushroom sauce was barely peeking out from underneath it.

     I cut this into 9 pieces and started serving it up.  Even the side view of the finished piece was pretty.

     The picture above didn't do it justice.  The crust was a creamy, eggy, almost-polenta-like texture.  The spinach mushroom sauce was salty and rich.  The tomatoes were a tangy and sweet under the pile of gooey cheese.  It was really good.  We didn't even miss the extra cheese in the crust!  I think if I were to make this again, I would definitely skip the cheese in the crust and decrease the amount of spinach.  I think it took away a little of the creaminess of the sauce and from the mushroom flavor.

     Jennifer had brought and made a Costco pepperoni pizza, too, and it was a good thing.  The kids ate most of that and left the Gourgere and the turnover to the adults.

     The turnover was really good, too.  The crust had a nice, crispy exterior, and the filling was cheesy and gooey.  There was just the barest hint of heat from the slow-simmered sauce - I had used my own hot pepper mixture in there instead of the regular red pepper flakes.  My peppers were ground finely, and there were some habeneros in the mixture, so it brought a little more oomph than regular pepper flake.  Other than that little bite, the tomato sauce was completely lost.  I wonder if it was even needed.
     It was a wonderful evening.  It was nice having everyone there for the whole evening for a change.  After dinner the boys went downstairs to watch the hockey game, while Pam, Jennifer, and I tried to start planning our Thanksgiving meal.  We got some great ideas, but we didn't really solidify any part of the menu.  Oh well.  We have next Thursday, right?