Pea Shoot and Feta Bureks

With the advent of my pea shoot delivery and a craving for Feta cheese, these little delights were born. My first thought was to combine the two in a spanakopita (a Greek spinach and cheese pie). After reading up, one of the big problems with spanakopita is that that spinach can be too moist, so the pea shoot would fare well I thought. I didn’t want to make a whole pie though, I wanted singular nibbles. After a bit of exploration, I found out (from wikipedia, so not really mich exploration actually…) that “Burek is a type of pie popular throughout the former Ottoman Empire. They are made of a thin flaky dough known as filo, and are filled with salty cheese (often Feta), minced meat, potatoes or other vegetables.” So I’m calling these bureks.

As a complete amateur cook, I’ve no idea if my concotion is hideously inauthentic but the mix smelt GOOD before it was wrapped in filo, and then DELICIOUS when they came out of the oven.

The mix is made from pea shoots, fresh parsley, sping onion and garlic which is cooked up to soften. Then I added an egg and crumbled in the Feta and stirring through.

I’ve never cooked with filo pastry before, so the experiment got a bit tricky at this point. I layered up three slices (?) of filo, sliced it into strips and then added a dollop of filling before folding it along the length of the strip into triangles. I brushed the pastry with olive oil, crossed my fingers, and put them in the oven at 175 Celsius for 25 minutes.

They turned out very well, and even TLM who doesn’t go in for pastry or fancy cheese scoffed happily. Long live experiments!