Thursday, September 22, 2016

Spanakopita triangles

For Tuesday's lunch, Ken used the last of our eggplant harvest to make a favorite Greek dish of ours: moussaka. It's made with layers of potato, eggplant, and spiced ground lamb, all of which is covered with a béchamel sauce before being baked in the oven. So we built a whole Greek-themed meal around that, starting with champignons à la grecque (Greek-style mushrooms) and flavored Greek olives as an appetizer. Our first course were these little spanakopita triangles served with a tzatziki sauce.

Once the triangles are made, they get brushed with olive oil and baked in the oven.

They're not true spanakopita in that I used Swiss chard from our garden in place of spinach, and substituted readily available feuilles de brick for phyllo dough, which is not easily found out here in the French countryside. I cooked the chard and chopped it up with spices and lemon juice, egg, and feta cheese. Then I folded the dough around the stuffing to form the triangles. It was much easier to do than I expected. The sauce was tzatziki, made with grated cucumber, yogurt, lemon juice, and olive oil.

After the moussaka I served a Greek salad of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, Greek olives, and chunks of feta cheese on a bed of lettuce, dressed with a lemony vinaigrette. Finally, our dessert was a Greek lemon cake (from a recipe by Ina Garten). Yum!

8 comments:

  1. This looks very tasty.... love these!
    And I was humming yesterday's earworm to myself all day long!!

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  2. Replies
    1. I didn't take a single photo of the moussaka. Tant pis !

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  3. I rather wish I was invited for dinner.

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  4. Who cares about not being able to get phyllo? Brick is sooooooo much easier to use and better behaved and crispier.

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  5. This sounds delicious! So many ingredients fresh from your garden help make it so, but the Greek theme was inspired, too.

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  6. Did you serve Ouzo also ?
    Just kidding :-)

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  7. tim, they were good. I made more yesterday.

    jean, glad you liked them!

    andrew, the drive home after might be a little rough... ;)

    susan, I agree. The brick was easy to work with and tasty, too.

    thickethouse, it's always good to find different things to do with the garden bounty.

    t.b., lol! Nope. We did enjoy a bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc, though. Unusual in these parts.

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