Jottage from Cambridge - Corner Shop Spanakopitta

Mixing the spinach, onion,
lemon and egg

It was hard to resist making something called ‘Spanakopitta’ even though I wasn’t wholly convinced that I was going to like it. Although I love spinach a dish containing a whole kilogram of the stuff seemed a bit excessive. Anyway as my mother wrote in her last blog Hugh rarely disappoints, and I’ve found over the last few weeks that what I would have dismissed straightaway suddenly seems quite tempting. It’s a truism I think that the more you cook the more appetite you have for cooking and, what would have looked like an alien recipe with ‘they surely won’t sell that in Sainsbury’s ingredients’, seems like a dish that can be knocked up between the end of Tristan’s dinner and the beginning of the game show that I’ve become strangely addicted to, ‘Pointless’. 

Adding the feta and pine nut

The Spanakopitta took about 30 minutes to put together – I am in total agreement with my mother about the amount of washing up that that Hugh’s meals require though and I’m sure it took at least the same amount of time to get my kitchen ship-shape again. It was a satisfying thing to make. I plonked Tristan in the high chair so that he could watch the spinach wilt on the stove, the pine-nuts toast under the grill and the onion gently sauté with the fresh thyme that competes for sunlight with the basil and hyacinths on my windowsill. I put it in the fridge and cooked it later on that evening so that my husband could enjoy a meal straight from the oven: he generally has to warm up his meals in the microwave as I’ve eaten a couple of hours earlier. It was a total success, though Theo thought that it could have done with more feta. We have more filling left over than pastry so I’ve decided to make little pasties with the remainder of the spinach concoction. Unfortunately the pie was a bit too salty to share with Tristan, but we’re planning on making the lamb with lemon and barley this weekend (Everyday book p.220) which I am certain he is going to love. 

The End Result