Sofia AngelaraHalloween is approaching and you will, probably, have started making plans of how to decorate your garden with spooky pumpkins. However, before you carve them all up, pop one aside and you make this delicious dish. Passed down to me from my grandmother in Greece and it’s a traditional, village-type pumpkin-pie with handmade pastry-leaves. You can make two versions of it, a salty and a sweet one but for today I picked the salty one. According to the Greek phrase: “About appetite… pumpkin-pie”, which means actually, that there are not standard rules or models in relation to taste.
Ingredients:
For the pastry-leaves:
1-½ cups of water
1 tablespoon of vinegar
A little salt
Half cup of olive oil
Flour for bread + plain flour (mixed together)
For the filling:
A pumpkin
One tablespoon of olive oil
I cup of short-grain rice
A little salt
1 litre of milk
A little pepper
5 eggs
300 gr. of feta cheese
A little cornflower
Tools:
A big bowl
A rolling pin
A cooking pot
A baking pan
Firstly, remove the fibers of the pumpkin and grate the rest of its content.
For the pastry, use your hands to mix all of the ingredients in a big bowl putting slowly the already mixed flours till you feel that the texture is thick enough without sticking through your hands. Cover the bowl with a towel and leave it aside.
Then for the preparation of the filling, fill a cooking pot with two fingers of water and a tablespoon of olive oil. When it starts boiling, pour into the rice with a little bit of salt and leave it to boil for 10-15 minutes. Afterwards, pour in the grated pumpkin and the milk, a little bit of pepper and salt. When it becomes porridge, take it from fire and leave it aside to get a little cold. Then, bit the eggs and pour them inside the content and mix them altogether. Be careful the porridge not to be too hot before putting the eggs because they might get thickened. Then grate the feta cheese and pour it again inside the content of the pot. Mix them all together and leave the pot aside for the moment.
In order to make the pastry leaves, drop a little cornflower to the kitchen surface and each time take an as-much-as-the-hand-can-hold piece of the pastry-mix and open it using the rolling pin into a not-so-thin leave and longer enough than the baking pan you are going to use. Trust me there is a reason for this. In order to avoid the pastry to stick with the pin drop cornflower whenever it is necessary.
When the pastry leaves are done, firstly, preheat the oven at 180°. Then cover a baking pan with oil and place 5-6 leaves of pastry one upon another by putting in between a little bit of oil. Leave the parts of pastry that overflow from the pan as they are. Then pour into the filling and place another 5-6 leaves with the same way. At the end, turn the overflowed pieces altogether and roll them in order to create nice and thick corners for the pie. Take a fork and make small halls upon the pie, not till the bottom of the surface but till the first 5-6 leaves height. Put the pie into the oven and leave it to be baked for 1 hour or 1 and 30 minutes, depending on the type of the oven and how quickly it bakes.
Serve it when it’s hot —the smell is mouthwatering— and enjoy…
