Filo evil, hear no evil- adventures in pastry.

Apologies for the terrible pun.

This week, I have mostly been experimenting with filo pastry. By which I mean I made salmon en croute with it on Tuesday, and then used the leftovers on Wednesday because I was hungover and couldn’t be arsed to go to the shops.

I like filo pastry a lot, but almost never eat it. It just doesn’t occur to me to do it at home. I think it’s the finicky layering of each sheet with butter and building up the leaves and all that hooha. Leave it to Masterchef the Professionals, that would be my motto.

However, amongst the people having supper on Tuesday were going to be the two women whose advice I would call on if I ever needed some inspiration on what to cook for a dinner party. So I obviously couldn’t ask them, and it had to be good because they are both fantastic cooks. I hit upon salmon en croute because I was, as is so often the case, daydreaming about beef wellington, and its piscine cousin just meandered into my head in the below vaguely Greek incarnation.

The whole shebang could not have been simpler – I urge you to try it. Everyone really enjoyed it (or they said they did, which is the same thing) and it looked mega impressive straight from the oven, although less so after I tried to cut it up and it turned into something that resembled spawning time at an intensive fish farm. I think that was the ricotta…

Σολομός σε φύλλο κρούστας
(told you it was vaguely Greek)
Serves 6

You will need:
800g salmon fillet
1 tub ricotta
1 small block of feta
Big bag of spinach
Juice of 1 lemon
6 sheets of filo pastry
Knob of melted butter.

Method:

Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper or foil. Ideally be prepared enough to have either of these two items in your kitchen, so one of your guests doesn’t have to bring them.

Melt the butter.

Unwrap the filo pastry and put one layer in the bottom of the tray. Lightly brush with melted butter. I don’t have a pastry brush, so used the back of a spoon. It would have been better with a brush.

Pop another layer of filo on top. Butter, brush.

Pop another layer of filo on top of that.

This is less tedious to do than it is to write, primarily because the filo is extraordinarily thin and delicate and therefore (in the direct opposite of the same in relation to human beings) fun to play with.

Cut the salmon in half lengthways so it’s in two roughly 400g chunks. Or, buy it in two roughly 400g chunks.

Wilt the spinach in a pan. Add the ricotta, lemon juice, feta and season well. Stir it around so it’s a sort of greeny mush.

Put one of the salmon fillets on the pastry. Cover with the spinach mixture. Pop the other salmon fillet on top and cover again.

Do three layers of filo over the top as per the earlier method, and scrunch the sides of them into the sides of the three layers on the bottom.

Bake at 200 degrees for about 25 minutes or until the filo is golden and crunchy.

Serve with watercress salad, new potatoes, and apparently 7 bottles of wine.

The next evening, I mixed up a bit of leftover ricotta with some chives, pesto and garlic and wrapped it up into two little filo parcels. I did not do the faffy butter thing. It didn’t matter too much. After 15 minutes in the oven during which time I contemplated the wisdom of Tuesday night dinner parties, it was delicious.

Tales of woe/French Onion Soup

The last two months have passed in a whirl of weddings (not mine), holidays, watery sunlight, minor heartbreak, and lots of wine. I have been on some kind of self-imposed summer of madness, characterised by terrible decisions and huge amounts of fun. But now it’s the end of September, and I know it’s time to get serious because my housemate has developed an obsession with gardening (she sent me an email with a link to a website of seeds).

Having monumentally failed in our pre-summer plan of setting up a herb garden on the balcony, instead decorating it with the gritty, urban realism of a bath mat and a giant pot full of cigarette butts (update: now cleaned up), we are turning our attention to late planting vegetables. Turns out all you can plant in autumn is basically onions and garlic. Which will be great for French Onion Soup and minimising the risk of a vampire attack, respectively.

French Onion Soup is something I had never made before, despite liking it so much that I have the occasions when it’s Soup of the Day at Eat marked with a reminder in my Outlook calendar. In fact, for various reasons I still haven’t actually made it, but more of that later.

The weather has turned sufficiently cold for it to be acceptable to have people over for supper and serve them soup, so a date was set, and the night before that date I sat down with my beautiful Swiss knives and a glass of brandy and set to work on the onions. NB. This is an incredibly antisocial thing to do in any kind of shared accommodation, as not everyone can cope with 700g of chopped onions. Well, that’s why I told everyone I was crying, anyway.

My recipe was a mixture of Simon Hopkinson’s, Nigel Slater’s and Felicity Cloake’s ‘How to Make the Perfect…’ series in the Guardian. There are all sorts of variations in terms of what booze to use, what type of onion, blah blah blah, but the key point is the onions must stew for as long as possible, preferably over an hour, on a very low heat.

Duly stewed, I added the stock, brought it to boil and left it overnight, my plan being to casually reheat it (adding the bits and bobs that make it special -brandy, wine, different stock, gruyere croutons) that evening in front of my grateful guests, when it would be served with a big green salad and a cheeseboard in a vaguely alcoholic parody of the Good Life.

I think, with the benefit of hindsight, my main mistake was sending a text to all guests that said ‘Bring booze. No mixers’. I had assumed that clearly meant that I needed people to bring drinks, and that I didn’t have any mixers. Apparently not, given that everyone turned up with bottles of spirits and no mixers. I am actually sort of impressed that people think so much of me.

To cut a long story short, we drank it anyway. At some point the cheese came out, and was demolished. The pot of half finished soup stared at me balefully from the hob as I insisted on listening to INXS’s ‘New Sensation’ 15 times. The last thing I remember is realising that it may have only been 9:50pm but I was in urgent need of a party nap. This was invented by my friend, the Legal Robot, who has a habit of spontaneously falling asleep in the middle of parties, and waking up totally refreshed and rebooted 20 minutes later. Just once, for 10 minutes, I was going to follow his lead.

I don’t think you need me to elucidate on how I woke up 9 hours later, with two of my sisters in my bed (one of whom hadn’t even arrived by ‘naptime’) with whiskers and ‘I am a mouse’ written on my face.

I am pretty sure I will get over the incredible embarrassment of this event, and probably sooner than I should, but do you know what the worst part is?

Crazed with neat spirits and hunger, my guests took it upon themselves to heat up the soup. The half finished soup. And so, with the hostess asleep in the next room, they all ate bowls of lukewarm hot onion water. The End.

If it’s any consolation, it’s all going to be very serious from now on.