Spanakopita - A Greek Starter

Couple of months back after making an yummy Greek dessert - Baklava , I was wondering about how to use up the little of the remaining phyllo sheets. I thought of going again for the same Baklava - the rolled up version, then something stopped me warning me about the calories. So after browsing through the numerous bookmarked recipes on starters and appetizers, I settled on Spanakopita that aptly needed the exact amount of sheets that I had in hand.




I adapted the recipe from Here by omitting the egg and baking instead of frying.


Ingredients:
2 cups of frozen spinach
1 small onion minced
2 garlic cloves minced
1 tsp red chilli flakes.
2 tblsp of chopped parsley or cilantro
salt and pepper
Butter or olive oil for brussing the phyllo pastry

Method
Thaw and sqeeze all the water from the Spinach/
Take a tblsp of olive oil in a pan and saute onion and garlic.
Stir in the spinach, salt , pepper and redchili flakes. Saute for 2 mins.
Allow it to cool and mix in the Feta cheese.

Place 3 phyllo pastry sheets on a flat surface.
Brush them with melted butter or olive oil on one side.
Cut the Pastry sheets into thin long rectangular shapes.
Place a tblsp of the stuffing and fold it like a triangle.
Keep folding the triangle continuosly left and right till you reach the end of the strip.
It will resemble a samosa wrapped in layers of trace paper.
Seal the edges with melted butter.

Bake in the  180C preheated oven for 20 mins or the pastry is well browned.
You can also substitute the Feta cheese with Ricotta or crumbled Paneer.





Sending these to the AWED event started by DK held this month  at  TastyCurryLeaf and also to Divya's  Healing food Spinach event.

Sending this also to this week's Bake-off event over at Bangalore Baker