21 February 2007

Waiter, there's something in my... (cheese) pie!!!

Cheese pies open.jpg

What can you possibly do when you have some fresh cheese near the expiration date and you have this intense urge to eat a cheese focaccia???
3 options:
1. Throw the cheese in the bin, take a train and head to Recco, eat hot cheese focaccia, go back on the train and head home with belly happily full;
2. Try, without any success, to make the wonderfully thin Focaccia di Recco at home, and end up with everything in the garbage (I'm NOT referring to an episode happened some years ago in my kitchen!);
3. Open "wish list of recipes I want to make but never have time to", find a cheese kind of focaccia, make it, post it and eat it.

I choose option 3 (albeit a nice trip to Recco would rather be nice...), and in the mean while why not submitting the recipe even to a nice event hosted this month by Cook sister!??? For the rules of the event, please find below the picture of the closed pie...

Here it is, freely adapted form Nigella Lawson's Feast (there goes under the title of Nana's Hachapuri). The dough is so light and airy that you won't even notice it! And the filling so tasty that you will end up asking yourself: "How could I possibly lived until now without eating this???"

Make 6 to 7 pies
For the dough
350 g flour
250 g low fat yoghurt
1 egg
25 g extra virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

To make the dough, albeit Nigella tells you how nice is to knead, I've used my Kenwood chef and knead all together with no effort at all! I'm a lazy girl, after all!
If you dough is too stiky (it should be like a pizza dough) add more flour, little by little.
Transfer it in a bowl, close it either with film of lid, and let it rest for at least 20 minutes.

For the filling
200 g feta cheese
200 g robiola
125 g (1) mozzarella

Cut mozzarella in little cube. Crumble feta cheese, mix it with mozzarella and robiola (you can use ricotta or cresenza or stracchino).

Preheat the oven at 200° C.
Take a bowl of dough, roll it on a floured surface with you hands. Do the same with the rest of the dough. Oil 6 or 7 little cake pans (or a big one, or those little plumcake pans I bought last Saturday, all together with the little rounded pans...). Cover them with the rolled dough, add 2 tablespoon of filling, close each pie and cook it for 10 minutes.

Enjoy while still hot!

P.S. I know it looks like I'm making the entire recipe collection of Nigella's books, but I swear you I have other cookbooks! Simply I'm in a Nigella state of mind... Will it ever end??? Who knows...

Cheese pie.jpg