I learned two important things making this recipe: first, that the Athens brand frozen phyllo dough does open into a long rectangle--you just have to unroll the square completely and then unfold it! And second, that toasted pine nuts (at least the Asian kind) smell like the inside of a van.
If you omit the pine nuts from this recipe, not only do you cut the cost by about a third, but also, you don't ruin the other ingredients you spent good money on. I made one "log" with pine nuts, and one without for my mom and sister (who ate most of it, although I tasted enough to know it was better).
You can also make this recipe much cheaper by using frozen spinach instead of $6 worth of organic baby spinach since you cook the stuff down anyway before spreading it on the pastry (I would have cried had I not accidentally bought some less-than-pretty boxes of spinach). I haven't tried the recipe with cooked frozen spinach, so I don't know if it would taste any worse, but that's what I'm going to use next time.
This recipe came from (surprise!) the Williams Sonoma book Easy Vegetarian. It's simple enough that I can just describe it.
The slow roasted tomatoes are just tomato halves that you cook in a baking dish at 250 degrees Fahrenheit for 2 hours (by dumb luck, they were done just as I had to put the phyllo rolls in, since I had to take care of the puppies while they cooked). Here's a picture from just before I took them out of the oven:
So about half an hour before your tomatoes are done, cook up about 12 oz. of spinach (I used two 5 oz. boxes of baby spinach) and drain it. If you want pine nuts in this, toast them in a dry skillet (the pine nuts themselves contain plenty of oil). I recommend finding the Mediterranean pine nuts, even if they're more expensive. I haven't tried them, but I read that they're much better, and this is obviously a Mediterranean recipe.
Mix together the drained spinach (really press the water out) and the pine nuts (if you want them) in a bowl with 8 oz. ricotta (go for the whole milk ricotta--you're worth it) and a few good shakes of salt and pepper. Unroll and unfold the phyllo (yes, it opens into a long rectangle!) and melt some butter and smear it between the sheets. (The book called for 6 oz. phyllo dough, even though it comes it 8 oz rolls, and claimed this was four sheets, but then obviously used more in the picture. Just use a whole roll of dough, and get it coated all over and in between with about half a stick of butter.)
Spread the spinach/cheese mixture over the dough rectangle. The book says to leave 2" all around and roll the dough up from the long end. I had the dough folded as a square and mostly covered it and rolled it up like that... that worked okay. I cooked two separate short logs (about 4 oz. phyllo dough each) like this:
(The mess in the front is buttered broken phyllo with a honey drizzle. I salted it hot out of the oven and it was so delicious!)
However you do it, get your filled dough on a baking sheet at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes (I had to go a little longer because I had short, fat rolls instead of one long thin one). When it's golden and crispy, cut slices and serve hot with the slow-roasted tomatoes, like so:
Or like so:
(It's the same serving, I just didn't know which angle looked better. I still need to work on my plating skills. It's harder than it looks!)
The photos above show a slice from the roll with pine nuts (the thicker one) and a slice from the roll without. They are undercooked. I put the leftovers away in a covered baking dish:
...So that when my mom and sister wanted some, I just popped it in the oven, and for them it was golden and crispy.
B- with pine nuts, A without
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