Spanakopita Triangles (using Frozen spinach)

Blogging Marathon# 60: Week 2/ Day 3

Theme: Take-Away dishes from Metropulos, Santa Barbara

Dish: Spanakopita Triangles (with frozen spinach and no egg)

For the final day of this week's BM, I made these addictive Spanakopita. It is a very popular savory baked Greek pastry. Filling made with spinach, onion & feta is enclosed in a flaky filo/ phyllo pastry and then baked till golden. This has been on my to-try list for a very long time and I'm glad I can now strike it off of my list :-)

Filo sheets are a little difficult to work with. They are temperamental and if not treated properly they tend to tear apart. So make sure to keep them covered with a damp kitchen towel or paper towels to avoid that. My filo sheets came out of the box with rips, but once I buttered, layered and folded them, they looked just fine. So don't worry if your sheets start ripping, just keep going and all will be well in the end, you just have to trust me on this :-)

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Strawberry Tartlets (Valentine's Day Recipe)

It is that time of the year, when love is in the air, strawberries and chocolates are highly sort after. I had plans on posting something totally different for the weeked, but then I remembered the big box of strawberries I picked up at Costco and that led me to think to look for a Valentine's day worthy recipe.

I got lucky in the second book I was browsing and found this really quick and easy to make Strawberry Tartlets. This recipe is from Costco Connection cookbook. Very few ingredients are needed for this recipe and luckily I had them all on hand. It took about 30 minutes to make the tartlets and they were all gone in less than 10 minutes.

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Turkish Kanefe/ Knafeh

Couple of my friends took me to a Turkish restaurant for my birthday this year. They ordered this crispy, flaky and sweet pastry and we were served a bubbling hot dessert that I used as a cake to blow the candle. The candle almost melted in the hot dessert. I was sold the minute I had my first bite -- it was sweet, crunchy, creamy and absolutely delicious. I heard the name of the dish but it hardly registered in my brain because I was busy eating it.

Then I saw Usha's post for Knafeh and then I realized that it can be made at home. So it had to become part of my Turkish meal. This dessert is very easy to put together, if you have all the ingredients ready.

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Homemade Turkish Baklava Recipe

Blogging Marathon# 37: Week 1/ Day 3
Theme: National Dishes from around the World
Dish: Turkish -- Baklava

For the final day of this week's marathon I made Turkish national dish, Baklava. I don't remember the first time I tasted baklava, but it was love at first taste. Baklava is a very rich, sweet pastry made of layers of Phyllo (fillo) dough filled with nuts and sweetened with honey and syrup. 

This has been on my to-make list for a very long time. But with really good Turkish friends we have always had good quality baklavas to enjoy, I never got a chance to try it myself. So this was my chance to make baklava at home and I've to say even though the process of making it is a little tedious with the phyllo (fillo) tearing and so on, but the final product is absolutely tasty and well worth the effort. It is also less expensive to make these at home.

Working with phyllo/ fillo dough is a little tedious and sometimes a little frustrating too as it tends to rip and tear. It is very important to keep the phyllo covered with damp towel at all times to prevent drying out. But it is not the end of the world, everything will turn out OK once the dish is finished.

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Austrian Vegetable Strudel

For this month's International Food Challenge, our host Briju Parthasarathy is taking us on a culinary tour of Austria. She gave us 4 Lower Austrian dishes to choose from and I picked the Austrian Vegetable Strudel.

Some wiki gyan about Strudel: Strudel is a type layered pastry with a -- most often -- sweet filling. Strudel is most often associated with Austrian cuisine but is also a traditional pastry in the whole area of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The savory strudel is filled with crisp tender vegetables and cheese. It almost sounded like the veggie pastry we used to get back home at the bakeries. Original recipe had rutabaga, parsnip etc, but I used vegetables I had on hand; sweet potato, carrots, green beans and red pepper. Also to add some protein, I added some soy granules as well.

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