Haute Cuisine 1.17

It has been a while since the last Haute Cuisine post, has it not?  Well, my mom recently signed me up for a monthly box of fresh veggies and fruit delivered to my doorstep, so of course this gives me a chance to experiment.  Anyhow, we have a lot of spinach and two fennel bulbs.  Now, I liked my fennel soup that I made before, though my boyfriend didn't like it.  One of the nice things was that it actually used the fennel fronds - most of the recipes only use the bulb (unless it's a salad, which I generally never eat).  Anyway, I am going to re-make the Fennel and Zucchini Soup, then the other bulb I will cut and roast with olives and garlic.

We also have a lot of spinach - again, good for salads but I don't like salad - so it is up to me to find some kind of dish for it.  I thought quiche at first, but most recipes I found involved Swiss cheese, which I don't like.  I didn't want to substitute, so I looked on my two favorite places to get recipes (bon appetit, and whole living) and found these two dishes: Spinach Dill Pie and Semolina and Spinach Gratin.  I want to try the pie most, because we have a lot of fresh dill and I want to use it.  It all depends on whether I can find phyllo dough.  If I cannot find any phyllo, then it's the gratin.

... Fast-forward several hours, I boiled the mustard greens, tossed with my sweet and creamy vinaigrette (custom made...) and just finished making the Fennel and Zucchini soup, and the Spinach Dill Pie.  I will say this right now - I will probably never ever cook anything that requires phyllo dough again.  Of course, I did just open it without letting it defrost first, that was my first mistake.  Then unrolling it and trying to pick it up was my next mistake.  Luckily I managed to get a couple sheets off easily enough to make 3 or 4 layers and make some semblance of a pie crust.

Next I proceeded to saute the onions and garlic in butter on the stove and got the spinach set aside, chopped it.  Eventually added it in and cooked it long enough to wilt.  In the meantime, I mixed the other ingredients together in a separate bowl.  Eventually it was all set to go and I just had to spoon it into the crust.

Once that was in the oven at 375F for approximately one hour until it got browned on the top, I got the soup going - so cut and sauteed the zucchini, fennel, and onions, and sauteed the tomatoes.  Added the fennel fronds to the tomatoes, blended the veggies in the container, and voila.  

Now that this is out of the oven, I gotta say it looks really good.  The crispy perfectly golden-browned top looks great.  I was worried I was gonna burn it by approximating one hour but it was pretty much on the dot. Now it's cooling and we shall eat it later tonight!  I'll probably include a cross-sectional picture once we cut it out.  Hopefully the dough turned out okay, the edges are probably more singed than ideal but whatever.