Fillo feta rolls for a Middle Eastern feast

Last week came one of the highlights of my culinary year. Ali and Lynn both have their birthdays near the end of July, and as we're all keen cooks and gourmets, we always get together for a themed feast. (Last year it was Spain - see here and here.) This year I had a new edition of Claudia Roden's A Book of Middle Eastern Food (my third, I've worn out the first two) and was giving a copy to Ali, so a Middle Eastern feast would work beautifully.
     
We had it at my place and each of us produced a starter and a main, and I also made dessert. Ali, the bread queen, made Turkish pide bread, herb fritters with haloumi, and grilled eggplant with labneh and za'ahtar. Lynn made red pepper and walnut dip and Morroccan couscous with chicken. I made yoghurt with cucumber and garlic, fillo feta rolls, and lamb and apricot stew with spiced basmati rice. For dessert I made our favourite orange and almond cake, with sliced oranges in syrup. (You may well think this sounds a lot, for lunch for three, and it was. We always cook too much - but we don't care, because we get wonderful leftovers.)
            I need to collect their recipes to share, but for now I thought it would be good to post the feta rolls. In my memoir I wrote about discovering fillo (or filo) pastries in Albania:

Rosia took the greatest pride in her byrek, small crisp three-cornered parcels of golden brown filo pastry filled with meat or cheese. But much as we loved them, we asked for them only if we were giving a proper party or coming back from a holiday, because the filo didn’t come in neat packets. Rosia and Hurimai pushed back the rugs and furniture in the sitting room and spread a white sheet over the marble tiles. They each took one end of a long thin dowel and delicately rolled out the dough into one great layer, so thin you could see through it.

The Albanian name, byrek or burek, comes from the Turkish börek described by Roden - she says the cheese one is the most popular. But her recipe is for rolls rather than Rosia's triangles. I did think about attempting the triangles, but the little cigar-shaped rolls are easier.
        As you'll see from the photo below, because of the rather broken sheets of fillo, and because there were only three of us, I was lazy and used all the filling to make three medium and three larger ones, rather than a lot of little ones - easier, and you get more filling in each one.

Sigara böregi
Little cheese rolls
(fSlightly adapted from Claudia Roden, The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, 2001)
Makes 16 little rolls (in theory!)

200 g feta cheese
(I got a genuine Greek one at the Mediterranean Warehouse, but Zany Zeus in Wellington also makes a very good one. If your block is wrapped in plastic, blot it well with kitchen paper before using.)
1 egg, lightly beaten
3-4 Tbsps finely chopped mint, flat parsley, or dill
8 thin sheets fillo pastry
(I could only find Edmonds, which is very thin and tends to break when unrolled. Roden recommends using 4 sheets of a thicker one, but I don't think it's obtainable here. However, I found that using two thin sheets together worked fine.)
4-6 Tbsps melted butter or oil

Take out the frozen fillo to defrost while you make the filling. (I found I had to defrost the whole packet, but could quickly refreeze the leftovers.)
Preheat oven to 190C, or 180C fan bake.
Spread a large oven sheet with baking paper.

Filling: Mash the feta well with a fork and mix it thoroughly with the beaten egg and herbs.

Assembly: Using 2 sheets of fillo together, cut them into rectangles, each about 30 cm by 10 cm. (You are meant to get 16 of these rectangles.) Pile these on top of each other as you cut them so that they don't dry out. (It helps to have ready a damp teatowel to cover them as you go.)
Lay out one pair of thin rectangles. Brush the top sheet with melted butter or oil. Take a heaped teaspoon of the filling and place it at one end of the strip in a thin sausage shape, about 2 cm from the three edges (see diagram).
Roll up the sheets with the filling inside, like rolling a cigarette. When you've rolled about a third of the way along the strip, turn in the sides to trap the filling. (Brushing on a bit of extra butter or oil is useful to help them stick.) Continue to roll with the sides turned in. Repeat with the remaining rectangles of fillo.

Lay the rolls close to each other on the baking paper, with the ends of rolled fillo underneath, and brush the tops and sides with melted butter or oil.

Baking: Place oven sheet with rolls at the middle of the preheated oven or slightly above. Bake for about 30 minutes, until the rolls are crisp and golden. Serve hot. (If necessary they can be reheated later - mine were.)

It was such a pleasure to bite into these and recapture a favourite taste of Albanian life. So now I plan to make the larger rolls again, to serve for dinner with salad...

Mediterranean medley

 I'm appalled to see how long it is since I've done a new post here. Of course I have been cooking, rather a lot, because my son needs decent dinners more than ever - he's juggling part-time teaching and university.  And I seem to have had more than usual to deal with - the groups I belong to have all sprung into action lately, requiring me to do things (all involving writing), rather than just being supportive. So I've had lots of practice at concocting appealing meals which don't require much effort. 
         Saturday night's dinner worked pretty well. I'm calling it "Mediterranean medley" as a kind of homage to those cringeworthy titles so beloved of 1970s magazine recipes stepping out into the then unknown (to most of us) world of foreign food. It was loosely based on Middle Eastern dishes - Jonathan's really keen on them, and I've loved them ever since I discovered Claudia Roden's Book of Middle Eastern Food in 1972. Here's what I wrote about it in my memoir:

Nancy Spain and Katharine Whitehorn had provided the absolute basics I needed to know, but there was much more to it than that: they were real writers who persuaded me that I could be, like them, a woman writer who cooked properly. In terms of food, Claudia Roden was on another plane altogether. She opened my eyes to a different kind of authenticity, based on intimate knowledge and love of what she was describing. For the first time, I began to understand fully what food, cooking and eating were about.

Only part of what I made on Saturday could be described as authentic, but taken as a whole it worked very well. We had hummus, Greek salad with feta, cucumber, tomato and olives, cucumber with garlic and yoghurt, and pita pockets spread with hummus and garlic mayo (bought) and filled with grilled Angus beef burgers and finely chopped cabbage salad. (Cabbage salad is entirely absent from Claudia Roden's book, but I had a large cabbage and no lettuce, so a bit of invention was called for.)

The hummus I usually make is the most basic kind - and the cheapest (much cheaper than bought hummus, and nicer). I see I've never put the recipe up on the blog, so here it is. Claudia's begins with cooking the chick peas, but thankfully there's no need to do that now - the tinned ones are fine, though you do need to rinse them well.

Hummus
(Adapted from A New Book of Middle Eastern Food)

1 450g tin of chickpeas, drained and rinsed
2 tsp cumin (optional)
2 large cloves garlic
50-90 ml fresh lemon juice
50 ml olive oil
salt to taste
warm pita bread to serve

Put the garlic in a blender or food processor and process to chop it finely.
Scrape down the bowl and add the chickpeas, cumin, half the lemon juice, half the olive oil and a little salt. Process and taste.
Add more lemon juice, oil and salt until you have the texture and taste you like (it should taste both lemony and a little salty, but not too much so). If it's still a bit thick, you can add a dash of water.
You can serve it with little black olives, a dribble of olive oil or some finely chopped parsley on top.

You can experiment with adding other flavours - ginger, sun-dried tomato - but I really prefer it plain. People often think you need tahina (sesame seed paste)to make hummus, but it's fine (and a good bit cheaper) without it. (Tahina gets a rather rancid taste quite quickly in the fridge, so don't be tempted to save by buying a large amount,as I once did). If you do want to add it, here's a later version of Roden's recipe.

Hummus bi Tahina

From Arabesque, Clauda Roden

1 450g tin of chickpeas

2 lemons, juice of

3 Tbsps tahini

3 garlic cloves

Salt

4 Tbsps olive oil

Garnish:

1 Tbsp olive oil

1 tsp paprika

1 tsp ground cumin

2 sprigs parsley, finely chopped

Process the garlic in a blender or food processor until finely chopped.

Drain the chickpeas and rinse well.

Add to the garlic, then add the lemon juice, tahina, garlic, olive oil, and salt.

Process to form a smooth texture.

Taste to check. If it is too thick, or not well flavoured enough, add a little more lemon juice and/or olive oil or salt.

Serve on a flat plate, garnished with a dribble of olive oil, a dusting of paprika and ground cumin (this is usually done in the shape of a cross) and a little parsley.

Serve with warm pita bread for dipping.