3.22.2018

SPINACH PIE // elspeth

WINTER BEGONE! Or, as Nora once told a coyote: Beat it nerd.



Where I grew up, in Maine, winter was different. It was cold, yes. But it was snowy—snowy straight through from December to mud season. I love snow. Sunny days with snow on the ground are incredibly bright and uplifting, and during a snowstorm the world is at peace, quiet.


Cape Cod winters, with all their rain and grey, are a challenge for me. But we're almost there ( ! ) and in the meantime we'll keep taking our cod liver oil and planting our seedlings and getting mood boosts through fatty fish and chocolate and oysters and dark leafy greens. Which brings me to my friend Sarah's spinach pie:


Sarah wrote a beautiful, clever, delicious cookbook called Feeding a Family, and I can't say enough good things about it. She and I met through our food writing work only to discover our husbands are old friends, and when she was writing the book, she asked me to contribute a few recipes for a seasonal meal. Four families besides her own are featured—one for each season—and two Septembers ago she sent out a photographer and we cooked a late summer harvest meal of ratatouille pie and mint chocolate chip ice cream. The photographs came out beautifully, and we got to share the ice cream, and she sent me a copy of the finished book at press time last winter. 

It's a treasure. It sits on my most-used shelf alongside Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills of Cooking and the Joy of Cooking and Nina Planck's Real Food Cookbook and Ottolenghi's Jerusalem and Plenty and Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain. In the past few weeks alone from Sarah's book I've made a rainy day chickpea stew; a simple dish of red lentils, rice and spinach; pasta with mussels, and a chicken tortilla soup. Finally, the other day, I tried the spanikopita, or spinach pie. 


My mom made spanikopita all the time when my sister and I were kids, but recipes I'd found before always seemed too fussy. Also, we've been aiming for zero waste, or at least much less waste, in our house the past few years, and the necessary ingredients for spanikopita involve a terrible amount of packaging. But no one's perfect, least of all me. The picture, the ingredients—they called me—and when I read that it bakes in a skillet rather than some pan that would need to be scrubbed afterward relentlessly, I was sold, all in.

I'm glad we tried it. It was so good, so satisfying—we all devoured it, and it felt like we all needed it. I'm sure you could make a version with fresh spinach when it comes into season, or now if you're able to get some this time of year at your local market, which many of you probably can. If you do that I guess I'd blanch the spinach first, then wring the water out, and aim for about the same weight.

In the meantime, even if you can't get local spinach, try the recipe anyway. It's easy and addictive and no one's perfect, and one day, when you do come into a supply of local spinach, you'll have a plan.

SKILLET SPANIKOPITA

This recipe comes—with very minor tweaks—from Feeding a Family by Sarah Waldman. Very soon fresh spinach will be in season, but in the meantime frozen works well. This recipe makes plenty of leftovers for our family of four. One note: take the leftovers out of the pan and store them in a glass container, as leaving them in there will give them a metallic taste as they soak up iron from the skillet.

30 ounces frozen spinach, thawed
6 tablespoons butter
1 small yellow onion, minced
2 cups whole-milk ricotta
4 eggs
1/3 cup crumbled feta cheese
3 tablespoons fresh chopped dill
juice of 1 lemon
1 teaspoon salt
freshly cracked pepper
6 sheets phyllo dough, thawed

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Melt 3 tablespoons butter in a 10-inch cast iron skillet. Meanwhile, wring any excess water from the spinach. Add the onions to the butter and sauté until tender, about 5-7 minutes. Turn off the heat and stir in the spinach, ricotta, eggs, feta, dill, lemon juice, and pepper to taste. Mix well. Melt the remaining butter in a small saucepan.

Lay the first sheet of phyllo dough over the spinach mixture and brush it with melted butter, scrunching up the edges up to fit in the pan. Repeat with remaining sheets of phyllo. Sprinkle a bit of salt on top and put the pie in the oven. Bake for 30-35 minutes until heated through and crispy and golden on top.
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P.S. ! Sarah and I will both be part of a day long symposium on food, writing, and community this June at Castle Hill in Truro. There will be panel discussions, workshops, and of course, local eats. Check it out: organizers are calling it Beyond the Plate.  

In addition, I'm teaching a four week writing workshop at Castle Hill, Wednesdays in May. Hope to see you there! 

3.08.2018

HATCHING CHICKS // elspeth


For this week's Local Food Report, I talked with my friend Justine in Truro about hatching chicks. She's got a flock of seventeen chickens—give or take, depending on the raccoons—and last summer, one of her hens went broody. You can hear her story of becoming an accidental chicken breeder on the show.

When I was doing research for the piece, I pulled out my favorite book on raising chickens: The Small-Scale Poultry Flock, by Harvey Ussery.  It's an in-depth, practical book that covers every aspect of chicken husbandry from raising chicks to making and managing your own feed to dealing with aggressive roosters. There are several chapters toward the end on breeding and working with broody hens, and they've got all kinds of fascinating information.


First off, a hen that's gone broody is essentially a hen looking to start a family. She stops laying eggs and instead starts sitting on them and incubating them, and she won't get off until 15 days later, when they hatch. In wild birds of most species, this process is triggered when the female has found and mated with a male. Most birds only lay eggs that are fertile and will only incubate and hatch their own eggs. But after centuries of domesticity, chickens have had most of these natural tendencies suppressed. Most hens don't go broody—they simply lay an egg a day, fertilized or not, and then get up and leave the nest. This is good for egg production, because farmers mainly want to sell eggs, not hatch them. And unlike a wild bird, a broody hen will sit on any chicken's eggs—and even duck eggs!—not just her own. Which means farmers can isolate hens and roosters they want to breed, take these eggs, and set them under a different hen who goes broody and has good mothering instincts. 

According to Mr. Ussery, if you have between eight and twelve hens it only takes one rooster to guarantee virtually 100 percent of the eggs will be fertile. But even up to twenty five hens per rooster, most eggs will still be fertile. You can see why so many roosters hit the soup pot.


Certain breeds of hens are more and less likely to go broody—Old English Games, Nankin, and Silkies are three breeds favored as mothers. Hens are more likely to go broody in the spring or early summer, but it can happen anytime, and some hens will go broody multiple times a year. If a mother hen tries to sit on too many eggs—more than are comfortably covered by her body—all the eggs have a higher chance of mortality, as they need to be kept constantly at her body temperature to survive. Some farmers use a technique call "candling" to hold a light up to developing eggs at night. Broody hens can be aggressive, and the only time a broody hen will allow someone peacefully into the nest is at night, so farmers hold a light up to each egg to see if the chicks are developing inside. If not, they remove the eggs that are duds, because otherwise they can explode and the gunk can coat over and suffocate the remaining eggs, which need to be able to breathe through the membrane of the shell.

Once the babies are born, the mother won't make any effort to save a weak chick or an egg that doesn't hatch. She focuses all her energy on the healthy babies and protects them from the rest of the flock until they're big enough to fend on their own.

For now, we don't have any roosters. (Actually, for the foreseeable future—since our permit from the town very clearly says in all caps NO ROOSTERS!) But if a hen starts going broody, I could get some fertilized eggs from a friend to slip under her. At any rate, I find it all fascinating. Has anyone out there ever hatched their own chicks? Candled eggs? Raised chicken babies? Would love to hear more.

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All text, photographs, and other original material copyright 2008-2010 by Elspeth Hay unless otherwise noted.