Greek Hand Pies with Greens, Dill, Mint and Feta plus a work in progress

A few apartments ago, I lived with a lovely girl who was not much of cook (her idea of getting gourmet veggies into her diet was to buy pre-cooked rice packets with shredded carrots in them). Imagine my surprise (and delight!) when she suddenly was receiving Food and Wine magazine. My thoughts immediately went to how I can discreetly raid her magazines before she got to them. Turned out she got the subscription free for ordering something on Amazon and that I was allowed to read them at will... which I somehow translated into "yeah sure you can cut out recipes from my magazines".

Well, one such recipe that I cut out was for Greek Hand Pies with Greens, Dill, Mint and Feta. Since I am now unemployed I have all the free time in the world!



I did a few things differently:

1. Thinking that this would be dinner tonight and that it should be a bit more substantial (and that there should be more filling) I added way more feta cheese.
2. I had no parmesan, so that was nixed.
3. I used all spinach, fresh mint but dried dill and oregano.

These are exceptionally tasty, but I think the original ratio of cheese to greens that the recipe suggests may be better, for they were very heavy. Very. Heavy.
I think this may have also thrown off the salt balance because they were way too salty, and I didn't add more salt than asked for. I would also like to try adding other greens to the recipe (dandelion greens were suggested) and I would probably make them more finger food/appetizer sized instead of just 4 big pies.

I made one for dinner, cooked a second, and the other two are currently freezing uncooked. We'll see how this affects texture when mr wong gets home...

A work in progress

A while ago I posted about my cherry tomato plant. Well it's time to face the fact that I have two problems. One being, I just don't like eating cherry tomatoes. The other being, I have a prolific cherry tomato plant. While admiring the spirit of my sad little plant I noticed a strange phenomenon. Since I don't like the fruits, I don't pick them, and because I don't pick them they just keep getting baked by the direct sunlight until they start looking a little pruney... almost like they're being dried...

Eureka! SUN DRIED TOMATOES.
See how some of them look a little crinkly already? They're on the way to sun-dried heaven! I set the crinklies aside and put the rest of the tomatoes on the dehydrator at about 5pm this afternoon. The crinklies, as an experiment, were set back out on my deck in full sun under a glass dish (to focus the heat more, maybe?). We'll see which ones are better: true sun-dried tomatoes or just dried tomatoes. Results to follow...