Dilly Spinach Pie - "Batsaria"

Man, I have the weirdest freakin' dreams sometimes.

I kid you not - I just woke up from a dream in which I was the main character in a remake of The Last Starfighter. The big bad guy was a giant Ko-Dan computer played by the Floating Head of Neil Patrick Harris, and it was a total smarmy jerk. Amongst our weaponry was a giant pencil that we used to disrupt the printouts he was forever spewing. The action was happening on... two dimensions... at the same time? Or something? With me switching between the Starfighter and myself, here on Earth, running around trying to do... well, I actually have no idea what part of the quest I was trying to accomplish on Earth. But there was something really important I was doing.

The stuff that we were doing with the giant pencil was having profoundly weird effects on Earth - we'd make some marks on his printout, which he'd then have to rewind in order to correct. (He was really, really anal, I guess.) As he was rewinding his printouts, time would fold backwards on Earth, which I'd then have to deal with when I switched back to Earth. Also, I think the head of AT&T was in some way in league with the Ko-Dan on Earth. I don't know why.

I'm not joking - this is the kind of thing that goes on in my head when left unsupervised. I think it's better all around that I just keep writing this blog.


I wish that was some type of clever lead-in into this blog post - but seriously, that crap was going to be rattling around in my skull until I spit it out somewhere. And that somewhere, Gentle Reader, is right into your eyeballs. Sorry.


Okay, now that that's over with. I made a Greek spinach pie for dinner tonight. The original recipe is here; I assume, from the text on that page, that this is called a Batsaria. It was absolutely delicious... but I would follow my recipe as opposed to the original. I'll talk about why later.

Dilly Spinach Pie

STUFF TO CHOP:
1 pound fresh spinach
3 leeks
5 green onions
1 bunch parsley
1 bunch dill
1 8 oz. package of Crimini (baby bella) mushrooms

STUFF TO BIND:
1 cup milk
3 eggs
3/4 cup olive oil

STUFF TO MAKE YUMMY:
12 oz crumbled feta cheese
2 tsp salt
2 tsp black pepper
1 tsp white sugar

STUFF TO MAKE CRUST:
4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
2 2/3 cups water
1/3 cup olive oil

STUFF TO TOP CRUST:
4 oz. grated Parmesan cheese
2 tbsp (1/4 stick) butter, cut into small chunks
2 tbsp olive oil
1 handful of dill weed



This isn't nearly as difficult as the ingredients list makes it out to be - there's basically a lot of chopping, but once that's all done, the recipe is basically "mix it all up in a bowl and spread it in a pan." You can pretty much ignore the groups I put the ingredients into - the "crust" and "crust topping" groups are useful break-outs, but the other three groups all get mixed together. I was thinking about what the different parts of the recipe were doing, though, and broke them up this way in my head; I though that it might be interesting and/or educational to write up the recipe that way.



What I did differently from the original recipe:

The first thing I did was axe the mint that the original recipe uses; I do not like mint, Sam I Am. In retrospect, that may have been a mistake.

One thing that I've been realizing recently is that my knowledge of spices is really lacking in the middle of the range, if you will allow me to go back to the music metaphor. I'm getting pretty good with the high notes, the cumins or wasabis, that jump out and grab your attention. And I'm getting pretty good with the bass notes, the turmerics and oreganos - deep notes that you can build a dish on. But I'm really weak in the middle range - the things that sustain a piece.

Take, for example, a curry I made recently. I started out by heating up some oil and frying up a who's who of my favorite spices - cumin, turmeric, coriander, fennel; added some garam masala for kicks. The smell was utterly heavenly; the entire house smelled mouth-wateringly delicious. But when served over rice, the dish didn't even come close to living up to its smell. Frankly, it was somewhat boring - an explosion on the nose, and on the tip of your tongue, but after that - nothing.

This story has a happy ending - though dinner was somewhat boring, when I ate the leftovers for lunch the day after, it tasted perfect. The flavors had mellowed out quite a bit, and the sauce had soaked into the rice, mixing the flavors much better. But still, the dish was quite a disappointment.

Now that I think about it, maybe the answer isn't that I'm spicing things incorrectly, maybe I just need to give dishes like this time to cool and mix before serving.

But for now, I'm going to assume that the problem is the way I'm spicing it - that I'm paying too much attention to the top and bottom, and leaving out the middle.

That's definitely where this dish has problems. Not that it wasn't good  - hell, not that it wasn't great. I mean, how could something which includes a full pound of cheese NOT be great? But I feel like, perhaps, the mint was there to fill out the middle notes - middle notes which were definitely the weakest part of this. Next time I try it, I'll definitely include the mint, just to see how it comes out. (Maybe the mint will be like cilantro in chili. I don't like cilantro, in general, but chili really needs it to reach its fullest flavor.)


I had two big problems, not with the contents of the original recipe, but the way that it was presented. Pet peeves, really. First, in every supermarket I've been to, cheese is sold by weight, not volume. So, I've substituted the weight that I had to use to get that amount for you. Second, the original recipe calls for salt and pepper "to taste". Now, I don't know about you, but I'm not inclined to taste a mixture of sugar, olive oil, and leeks... especially when raw egg is the chaser. [1] So, I'm going to strongly suggest that you add two big pinches of kosher salt and two big grinds of pepper, or two teaspoons of each.

(Also, as a number three: Come on. You split it up into three steps. Step one: preheat oven. Step two: Do all the cooking. Step three: Put in in the oven. Can we divide things a little better than that?)


Another thing I changed was adding mushrooms. I mean, come on. Look at that original recipe. Where are the mushrooms? There's an empty line there that SHOULD say "Now get some mushrooms, ja?" Ja. Victoria also suggested black olives, or maybe kalamatas - which would add some salt, and probably do the job of filling in that middle-range flavor I was talking about.


The cooking itself is fairly easy. First, whisk together all the crust ingredients in a mixing bowl. Grease up a baking pan. The original recipe says a "deep 9x9", but I don't have any particularly deep pans. A 13x9 is the way to go here, unless you've got some sort of specialized bakeware. Once the pan is greased, lay half the crust batter down on the bottom.

Now, the filling. Beat the eggs, then mix everything in the "chop", "bind", and "yummy" categories into the eggs. Spoon everything (gently) into the pan - as much as possible you want to lay it on top of the crust batter, rather than letting it drop all the way though. The batter is pretty thick, so it's not that big a deal.

You've still got about half the batter left, right? Spoon it on top of the spinach mixture to make a top crust layer. The original recipe again slips up a bit - it calls for 2/3 of the batter on the bottom, 1/3 on top, but that wasn't enough for me to make a decent top layer, so I wound up having to mix up some additional crust. If, for whatever reason, this turns out to not be enough, don't be afraid to make some more of the crust mixture. 1 cup of flour, 1/4 tsp salt, 2/3 cup water, 1 tbsp olive oil.

I really feel bad about ragging on the original recipe constantly - I'm ripping off someone else's dinner for a blog post. And in the end, it's a great meal, just not a well-written recipe, so kudos. Still - I have no idea why the recipe tries to divide the crust 2/3 - 1/3, and those proportions simply didn't work. (Probably, in part, because it's trying to fit way, way too much filling into a 9x9 pan. I just looked online for "deep 9x9 pan", and I couldn't find anything aside from the standard sizes - 9x9x2 or 9x9x1.5.) I think half and half should work fine; if not, like I said, just mix up an extra cup of batter.


Now that you've got a nice smooth top crust, put the "crust topping" stuff on top of it. Butter plus olive oil seems like a touch of overkill... but never let it be said that I wasn't willing to destroy my heart in pursuit of a delicious meal. Toss the whole thing in a 350 degree oven for an hour, or until the crust is all crusty. And the cheese is all melty. Take it out, give it a good twenty minutes or more on a cooling rack, and dig in. Serve with a Greek salad, some tomatoes, and quite possibly a prescription for Lipitor.





[1] It occurred to me that I've always interpreted the phrase "to taste" to mean "taste the dish, and add salt and pepper until you think it tastes good." Now that I'm thinking about it, it might very well just mean "you know your own tastes - add as much salt and pepper as you think you would enjoy." I still think that my original interpretation is more likely, but...