A recipe born from the contents of the fridge, my drive to use up leftovers and some added inspiration from my mother.
Ingredients:
Frozen phyllo dough (defrosted 6 hours)
1 stick melted butter
3/4 tub of ricotta cheese – leftover from ravioli experiments
1/2 piece of potent and over ripe blue cheese
1 small onion
1 punnet of crimini mushrooms
A couple of glugs of olive oil
Salt and pepper
Flat leaf parsley, to garnish
I hadn’t worked with phyllo for a while, and it can be a little on the fiddly side. I think I used 6-8 layers of pastry, with melted butter between each one and on top. I folded over the edges and trimmed a little.
I crumbled the blue cheese and mixed it into the ricotta. This mixture was then spread onto the phyllo dough. I sauteed the onions and then added the sliced mushrooms and briefly sauteed them. After seasoning them with salt and pepper I spread this mixture on top of the cheese. It baked for 35-40 minutes at 375º until golden brown.
It worked well as an appetizer and could be cut into small squares for an hors d’oeuvres. The blue cheese flavor was still strong even though there was at least a 1:2 ratio of blue cheese to ricotta.
