This is my grandma’s recipe and has been a huge success in every dinner we’ve served it. The idea behind the rolls actually belongs to my great-grandmother, so it’s a very old family recipe. I remember watching my grandma make the spinach pie rolls with an incredible speed and dexterity that still I can’t achieve. It is a very easy recipe that can be adapted to your liking, with any aromatics and greens you prefer or can find, except from the spinach and the green onions which are necessary. Its only difficulty lies in making the rolls, but after a couple of tries it won’t feel so hard. It’s ideal for parties, as a snack for trips and days out, or as an appetizer, since the rolls can be eaten by hand.

Ingredients (for about 20 rolls)

• 1kg frozen spinach, pre-chopped
• 2 leeks, chopped into thin slices
• 1 pack of green onions, sliced thinly
• 1 pack of “myronia” (aromatic herb), chopped into small pieces
• dill and fennel, chopped into small pieces
• feta cheese (preferably the hard kind), chopped into cubes, at least 200gr
• 1 espresso cup rice or trachanas (type of traditional Greek pasta, size like a rice grain)
• 1 pack of fyllo, preferably refrigerated and not frozen
• extra virgin olive oil, + extra for wrapping the rolls
• salt, pepper

Tools & objects

• 2 trays
• greaseproof paper
• deep pan with lid
• spatula
• scissors
• spoon
• brush
• strainer

Execution

Wash thoroughly, clean and chop the greek onions, the myronia, the leeks and the dill and fenel. Put each ingredient into a separate bowl to make it easier for us to get when cooking. It doesn’t matter if our herbs and greens are frozen.

In the deep pan, add the olive oil and green onions. Saute in medium to high heat. Once they start wilting, add the leeks. Saute until the leeks have also wilted. Add the myronia and continue sauteeing. Finally, add the dill and fennel, stir well and cook for a further minute.

Start adding the spinach little by little, and lower the heat to a medium setting. Each time we add some spinach, we cover the pot with the lid and wait for 1-2 minutes until the ice in our frozen spinach has melted and the spinach has softened. Repeat until we have added and softened all of our spinach and it has been mixed well with the rest of the ingredients. Turn off the heat and remove the pan from the stove.

Put a little of our spinach mix in the strainer and press well with the spatula (here, ideally a silicon one) to remove most of the liquid from our mixture. Throw the strained mixture into a bowl. When we have strained all of our spinach mix, add the chopped feta, the trachana, salt and pepper and mix very well.

Put greaseproof paper to our 2 pans. Open the fyllo package and un-roll the roll of fyllo leaves. Using a scissor, cut the fyllo leaves in two in the middle of the long side. It doesn’t matter if the leaves are not perfectly cut into two, but we need to be careful not to rip them as we won’t be able to use them then. This way we get double the leaves and rolls.

On each fyllo leaf, using the brush, put olive oil on the one short and the two long sides to create a thick “line” of olive oil on each of these sides. With the spoon, add approximately 2 spoonfulls of filling on the short side, immediately after the point where our olive oil “line” ends. Place the filling so it creates a thick “line” until the point where the olive oil on the long sides stops.

Wrap the short side of the fyllo leaf to cover the filling well and press from all three sides (left, right and short side until immediately after the filling). Wrap the two long sides until the point where the “line” of olive oil ends and press well. Roll the fyllo leaf from the short side until you run out of leaf. Place the roll on the tray with the end of the leaf on the bottom so it will not un-roll and oil it well using the brush. Repeat until you have used all the leaves and / or filling.

Pre-heat the oven at 180^o C. Once its warm, place the trays and cook on the hot air setting for about 20-30 minutes, until they have turned golden. Once the fillo starts browning, switch the trays so that the one that was higher in the oven gets lower and vice versa.

Remove from the oven and let the rolls cool. Serve with Greek yogurt.

You can store the rolls in the fridge and eat them later. In this case, place kitchen roll paper at the bottom of the tupperware container and on top of the rolls to soak up as much olive oil as possible and keep them crispy.

*Note: If we don’t want to cut the fyllo leaves in half we can. We will still need to brush olive oil on the short side. In this case, we will have as many rolls as leaves in the fyllo package and each one will need double the amount of filling, so about 4 spoonfuls. The rolls produced this way, will be portion-sized instead of half-portion.