I spent a relatively large portion of this weekend cooking. (Other portions were spent sleeping, drinking wine, eating, pulling up some of the seventy billion maple seedlings that have sprung up in the back yard, driving, walking on the beach with Science Girl, and walking the dog. Just in the interest of full disclosure, y’know.) It’s nice to be in front of the stove again. I went through a period where I either didn’t feel like cooking or couldn’t think of anything I wanted to make. I’m not sure what that was about, but it seems to have passed. SG has been very gracious about picking up my slack, and we’ve been eating out a little more than usual, too.
The first time through a recipe I try to follow it to the letter, just to see what the writer was getting at; on my next pass, I feel free to improvise off of their original riff. Saturday I tried out a recipe for shrimp with feta in tomato sauce. It was OK, I guess, tasting more like prawns in cocktail sauce than anything else. I think next time I’ll add more cayenne and garlic. (I should have known one clove wasn’t going to be enough.) The spinach salad was pretty good, although I’ll be toasting the pine nuts in the oven next time, rather than sautéing in butter. It seemed like a good idea at the time – and it wasn’t bad, just not worth the effort.
We finished the shrimp at lunch on Sunday; spending the night in the fridge seemed to help things out a little bit. Science Girl made some of her fabulous hummous; she bases her recipe on this one. Yummy, and much better than my tired little crustaceans.
Since we had some spinach left over, I decided to make spanikopita. The recipe I used was somewhat similar to this, although I used fresh spinach (steamed until just wilting), omitted the venison (?) and dill, and brushed the phyllo with olive oil instead of butter. I’ve always been leery of using phyllo; I have a pretty strong memory of my mom being brought to tears by a three-foot-long sheet of dough while trying to make baklava for Xmas, sometime in the mid-seventies. I am happy to report that phyllo comes in a much more manageable size these days. Of course, you have to let it thaw for two hours before you can use it – something I didn’t take into account while preparing the spinach mix.
If you’ll go over to your dictionary now, look up the word “dolt” and take a moment to admire the portrait they made of me for the illustration.
Fortunately, we weren’t counting on just the spanikopita for dinner. I’d found a recipe for chicken in wine and lemon in the same book (the Craig Claibourne I mentioned here), so I got going on that and some rice and steamed broccoli, and stuck the spinach mixture in the fridge until after dinner. The chicken was very simple (chicken, butter, scallion, lemon slices, white wine), very quick to put together, and pretty tasty, too.
SG was very gracious about my little meal-time debacle, refraining from braining me with the skillet or even saying anything nasty. Thanks, sweetie. Once we’d finished dinner, I took the now thawed phyllo and constructed my spanikopita, stuck it in the oven and hoped for the best. It actually came out OK, although I think I’ll try to press some of the moisture out of the spinach before I mix it in with the other ingredients next time around. Also, I want to use 7 sheets of phyllo for the top and bottom layers, vs. the 5 called for in the original recipe.
OK, this is a pretty dull post. I admit it. I'm really just making notes to myself more than anything else. I had nothing to go with tonight, so bare with me. I’ll try to have something about the new Modest Mouse CD by the end of the week. Maybe.
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