Phyllo & Spinach Wedges; Pierogis; Borodino

     I thought it was interesting that I should come to another recipe using phyllo dough the very next week.  It was nice that last week's recipe hadn't used all of the sheets from the box.  I still had over half of the sheets left over.  I wondered how close it was going to be to the spanikopita we had last week.

     My next stroke of luck was that I had one more brioche crust left in the freezer that I could use for the pierogis.  I read the recipe (past the ingredient list, which is the only thing I had read prior to Wednesday) and realized that the recipe is really set up for two different types of pierogis.  Since I didn't know whether I was going to have any guests tomorrow or not, I decided to make only one type - the mushroom ones.  I figured that the items I had purchased for the cheese filling would probably keep for a while, but the mushrooms were highly perishable.

     I decided the first order of business was to saute the green onions, garlic, and parsley for the phyllo wedges.  Then, add the spinach and cook it down.  I opted for less spinach than the recipe called for.  This was mainly because I had chosen my pan poorly.  I had two bags of spinach in the fridge, and realized that didn't come to three pounds, so I was going to call Jeff and have him pick some up on his way home, since they were buy one, get one free at Cub.  I picked up my phone, and he walked through the door with a bag of groceries.  I said, "shoot! I was going to have you get some spinach!"  He laughed and said he was way ahead of me and pulled out two more bags of the green weed.  As it was, though, I crammed the first two bags into my pan and could barely get the lid on.  That was when I decided 20 ounces was close enough.  You would think that I would have realized that, since I did almost the same exact thing last Wednesday.

     While the spinach was wilting, I mixed together the cheeses and eggs and set them aside to wait for the spinach.

     With the spinach cooked down, cooling and draining in a colander, I started working on the mushrooms for my pierogis.  In my first batch of mushrooms, I found a Siamese twin!

 

     It is probably a pretty common thing, but I hadn't ever remembered seeing it before, so I thought it was cool.  I almost hated to chop it up, but I did anyway.  I put the mushrooms, the onions and the hard boiled eggs all through my nifty chopper and got perfect cubes of each item.

     That warm, earthy smell of hot onions and mushrooms filled my kitchen and made my stomach growl.

I just love the aroma of sauteing mushrooms.  It is a warm and homey smell.  It reminds me of steak and woods and coziness all at once.

     After everything had completely cooled, I mixed the spinach in with the cheeses, and I mixed the mushroom onion combo with the sour cream, eggs, and bread crumbs.  All of it went into the fridge overnight.

     I came home on Thursday a little late.  I dove right into the preparations.  I went through the same tedious process I went through last Thursday - only I was using olive oil instead of melted butter. I knew it was worth it, so I kept going. Brush the pan with olive oil, lay down a sheet of phyllo, brush it with oil, lay another sheet down, brush it with oil, and continue in this manner until there are twelve sheets in the bottom of the pan.

     Then I piled the cheesy spinach mixture onto the phyllo.

     Then it started over with the layers of phyllo again until there were twelve layers of oiled phyllo over the cheese.

     It looked like I was tucking the cheese into bed.  I folded all of the excess phyllo back into the pan and down the sides of it, until the filling was all snug inside.
     I rolled the brioche dough out as thin as I could.  The recipe indicated that it should make 24 little dumplings, but I think my dough was half the amount that I was supposed to be using, and I only had one type of filling.  I found Jeff's biscuit cutters, thinking I could use one of those to cut out the circles of dough.  They were supposed to be four inches, but his largest biscuit cutter was 3 inches.  I decided to make it work anyway. I cut out a circle, and then I stretched it to four inches or close to that.  I think that they ended up being even larger than that, because when I looked at how much filling I had, I tried to shove as much into the disks as I could, stretching the dough even further to get it around the mound of mushrooms.

     I ended up with 19 dumplings.  They weren't uniform, and they weren't pretty.  I like to think of them as "rustic".

     At this point, I started wondering where my sisters were.  I texted each of them.  Jennifer was the first to respond: "I am in Birmingham".  She went on to remind me that she told me that last Thursday, but I had forgotten.  Shortly afterward, Pam texted, "I am in Birmingham."  That's right!  They were doing family things without me!  Not really - Pam was there for a flight training program she is a member of, and Jennifer was there for her job.  I looked at my pan of phyllo dough and my tray of pierogis and wondered if Jeff was going to be able to make it home in time to eat...  That is a lot of food just for me!  I debated about freezing them while they were uncooked.  I could bag them up and throw them in the freezer as they were and cook  them up for our Christmas Eve appetizer day.

     I made myself a Borodino while I contemplated.



Borodino

1 Measure Vodka

1 Measure Gin

1 Measure Cointreau (I used Grand Marnier)

Shake all the ingredients well with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.  Add a small piece of orange rind.

     The result of the deep contemplation?  I went through all of this effort, I wanted to eat these things tonight!  I could always freeze the leftover pierogis and bring them to Mom and Dad's for Christmas Eve.
     The cheesy phyllo pie took longer than the 35-40 minutes listed in the recipe.  I was guessing that it was because the filling was cold, straight out of the fridge, to begin with.  Once it was done, though, it was a beautiful, glossy, warm golden brown color.

     The pierogis were even more lovely.  Quite a few of them had split open at the seams, but they looked crispy and brown and sizzling hot.

     Jeff came home, just as I was pulling these out of the oven, and he was "starving"! 

     The phyllo wedges were heavier, cheesier, but less crispy than last week's spanikopita, but I felt it had a deeper flavor.  It was more of an entree than the spanikopita of last week.  It wasn't as salty, but it was delicious, all the same.  How can you go wrong with layers of oily crunchiness?

     I really enjoyed the pierogis, too.  I think Jeff liked them, too.  He had 6 of them, I think.  The crust was crispy on the outside and soft and chewy inside.  The filling was just as it smelled, warm and moist and homey.  They were good as they were, but I envision taking them up a notch with some sort of dipping sauce.  Jeff's preference would be a bowl of gravy, and that wouldn't be bad, but I am thinking of something with ginger and beef juis.  Maybe I will come up with something for the leftovers I will serve at Christmas Eve.  I look forward to trying the cheese version as well.