Spanakopizza

You know, it's kinda nice to be a Hausfrau. On one hand, you have all this time to experiment with recipes and food (and blog about it afterwards). On the other hand, there's all that laundry to get done. Le sigh. Working's nice, too. It's a shame that full-time work just kills my food fun stone dead.

So, what about that title? I hear you say. You misspelt it! Nope. You read it tight. My not-quite-cousin Rosemary made these fabulous vegan spanakopitas for Christmas, and we thought we'd give them a go. I knew she'd found the recipe at Fat Free Vegan, so we looked up the recipe, and lo and behold, it was an adaption of a recipe in Vegan Planet by Robin Robertson, one of the few vegan cookbooks we have. So we shut down the computer (as we no longer had an excuse to try out our spanky new printer) and pulled out Vegan Planet.

I'd never had spanakopita before Christmas (my parents were more interested in the gamut of Asian and Mexican foods), and I was surprised to discover on reading the recipe that I hadn't really had a true spanakopita at Christmas. Spanakopita, as the Wise Wikipedia informs me, means "spinach pie" in Greek; Rosemary had made something more akin to spinach tartlets. She'd also had the genius idea of adding nutritional yeast to add more of a cheesy taste to the tofu (spanakopitas are traditionally made with feta).

Our version was somewhere between the three versions, but we used cabbage instead of spinach, as that's what we had in the house, and my partner, Steph, insisted on pizza rather than pastry. We were lazy (against my will) and used a store-bought pizza base. I think I'm going to get into the habit of making large amounts of pizza dough and keeping it in the freezer so this doesn't happen again.

On the other hand, it was bloody delicious. This is our new favourite recipe.

Oh, and a note on cabbage before we begin. I read somewhere that cabbage has been given a bad rap due to the English's staunch insistence on boiling it until it tastes like dishwater. Try steaming it (or half-boiling, half-steaming it, as I did in this recipe; only fill the saucepan halfway) for about ten minutes or so, and you may discover that you like it. I was certainly surprised. We found our cabbage to taste almost buttery.


Photo by Steph


Spanakopizza

400g cabbage (or spinach, if you want to be traditional), roughly chopped into short strips
1 onion, chopped
4–5 cloves garlic
250g tofu, sliced and drained (but not pressed)
2 tsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp salt (I used trocomare)
ground black pepper
pinch grated nutmeg
1/2 tsp nutritional yeast
1/2 doz green stuffed olives, halved
1/2 doz grape tomatoes, halved
1/4 cup pine nuts
1 large pizza base

Heat the oven to 180°C.
Boil the cabbage lightly in salted water for about 10 minutes. Drain and put aside.
Meanwhile, steamfry the onion and garlic for about 5 minutes, or until the onion is translucent.
Transfer onion mixture to food processor, and add tofu, lemon juice, salt, pepper, nutmeg and yeast. Blitz until the tofu is crumbled finely.

Spread the tofu mixture on the pizza base, layer on the cabbage, and top with olives, tomatoes and pine nuts. Bake for around 15 minutes.

Feeds two hungry vegans.