How to Make Spinach Pie Part 1/2

Spinach Pie (makes 10 - 12 servings)

1 cup butter
4 cups onions, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
6 10-ounce packages frozen spinach
1 teaspoon olive oil
12 eggs beaten
2 teaspoons nutmeg
1 ½ cups grated parmesan cheese
¾ cup bread crumbs or croutons
1 pound feta cheese, crumbled
½ cup walnuts, pecans or pine nuts
½ pound unsalted butter
1 box phyllo dough, thawed

If you haven’t had the spinach pie in some of the editions lately, you’re in for a treat. I’m
going to show you how you make this spectacular dish. It’s very easy and you’re going to
really please all your guests when it comes out of the oven, really beautiful.

The ingredients are very simple. We’ve got spinach, parmesan cheese, walnuts, nutmeg,
garlic, some feta cheese, some Sweet Addition’s famous croutons along with lots of eggs,
onions and oh, just a lot of other good ingredients. And also some phyllo dough and
that’s where you’re probably going to say--you probably don’t want to watch it anymore,
but we’re going to go through it and you’re going to find it’s very, very easy. So let’s get
started.

First of all, we’re going to take the Sweet Addition croutons that they’re famous for. I'm
sure if you’ve had a salad recently in sweet edition, you’re going to find that there’s
always a crouton or two in it, and you could always buy them there. We’re going to take
this and use this as part of our filling for the spinach pie. You can also use seasoned
breadcrumbs if you don’t have these croutons and with a quick pulse, we’re going to get
these all ground. We want to make sure that they’re finely ground. You don’t want to
have chunks in there. So we’re going to let this whirl for just a little bit while longer. And
I like to check it every so often and then I’ll pulse it if there are any larger pieces. You
know, these croutons when they’re seasoned like this, and actually they’re finely ground,
make great breading for pork chops or even chicken cutlets. The herbs and olive oil and
garlic are just wonderful. I'm going to pour this back in because we’re going to get to
them a little bit later. We’ve got some other chopping to do. And you know what, I'm not
bothering washing the bowl. I'm going to use this bowl to chop my garlic, as well as my
onions. I’ve got four onions or four cuts of onions and I don’t want to be standing here all
day chopping onions.

So we’re going to get this going and I'm going to press down. And as I’ll show it to you,
you’re going to basically drop your garlic and it will whirl around and mince it
beautifully. I like lots of garlic with my spinach pie. Perfect! That’s done. There’s
nothing like fresh garlic. I certainly wouldn’t encourage powder but if you have it, you
could try it. But there isn’t anything like the fresh ingredients of garlic, spinach, fresh
spices as well, herbs, and we’ll get to that later.

Now, the recipe requires quite a few onions. So again, we’ll make quick work at this.
We’re going to cut four onions. I have my onions over here. I have my butter boiling
because we’re going to be using it for the phyllo. Taking an onion, the quick easy chop is
just to cut one end off and keep the root end on the bottom or keep the root end intact.
You’re going to slice through this and then if you’re going to actually chop or dice by
hand, you would peel this back. I’ll show you the trick that my chef gave me. You peel
this back and it actually allows the onion to stay intact while you chop, and then you
don’t have to worry about really cutting your fingers. I’ll give you a demonstration and
then we’re going to put it in the food processor and finish it up. But simply slice through.
Sharp knives are imperative to make easy work in the kitchen.

Okay, as you can see, this is all still intact so I don’t have to worry about it moving about.
I'm going to get two horizontal cuts and then a quick and easy chop. Look how simple
that is and everything is in nice order, and really very minimal waste. I take this and chop
that down, chop to the sides, get this little piece here. And you know what, my chef
would be real proud. There’s my butter boiling again. I'm going to turn that down and
we’ll get to that in a little bit.

Now, I'm going to put this in the blender, so now I am going to take this and I like to cut
these in quarters, or even six actually, fill this all in. And again, this makes very easy
work. You know also, too, if you have a chance and you want to, you can also purchase
already cut onions if you really don’t have time to do this. But it’s so easy and it also--
they will also keep them refrigerated for you if you have to make a big batch and you
want to use them throughout the week. I do that every so often, so it’s really nice if you
want to go home and make a quick meal, pull something out of the Sweet Edition
cookbook. You don’t have to worry about chopping your onions. They’re already
chopped for you, same thing with the garlic. Okay, another quick chop.

Now, I'm not going to overcrowd this because I want to make sure they’re kind of all
pretty much the same size. But again, it’s not a fancy dish. It’s really kind of homey. That
looks good, and we’re going to roll these up. A couple of pulses and we’re good to go.
That looks just about right. So I'm going to take this off and I'm going to put it in my
bowl. A nice little trick too is if you don’t want to lose your blade and you need to get
through that, just hang on to it at the very bottom.

Along with the rest of these, and let’s get cooking. What I want to do is take a large pan
to sauté these and I'm going to warm up my pan. I love this non-stick material. It’s great
for sautéing and I really don’t want to add any color. I’m really just going to sauté them.
Really, it’s more of a sweat because sautéing would be jumping, so I’ll tell you actually
in French, it means to jump and that’s not what I really want to do. I really just want to
sweat it. So I'm going to keep this up just a little bit and then I'm going to add some butter
and some oil, and this actually allows the butter not to burn, which is really great. You’ve
probably heard that before. And when this starts to get a little brown--or excuse me, a
little melted, we’re going to add our onions and our garlic. I’m going to turn up my heat.

I love these heat-resistant spatulas. They’re great for this kind of process in cooking. It
really makes it really easy. Wait until you smell this. The fragrance is just going to be
fabulous, a little bit of garlic, the butter is just now getting a little hot. You can see it
bubbling, and I'm going to throw the onions in as well. I'm looking at about four cups of
onions. We’re bringing out some of that extra moisture in the onions and that’s allowing
the garlic to actually sort of take away its bitterness or mellow just a bit.

This is exactly where I want my onions and garlic to be. They’re just perfect. So I'm
going to push it off this heat for a second and then I'm going to go back to the rest of my
filling.