Sometimes dinner is just jinxed.

 

My less than beautiful chicken roll-ups

I think it started with the grocery store. Jordan went Sunday, came home without the crescent rolls I needed for supper for a guest Monday. She swore that wasn’t on the list, I wore it was. No matter, I would use puff pastry. I asked for spinach—my bad for not specifying a bag of frozen. She knows I like canned spinach (I think I am the only person left in the world who does, especially since my childhood friend Eleanor Lee who used to eat it with me has left us.) But I couldn’t quite imagine making creamed spinach with the canned.

All things work to some good. Mary V., my dinner guest, just happened to have a bag of frozen chopped spinach which she obligingly brought to dinner. By the time she arrived, I had the cream sauce—butter, sauteed onions, cream cheese, and Parmesan—ready to go. She left with the recipe clutched in her hand.

The chicken roll-ups were another matter. I made the mixture of shredded chicken, cream cheese, grated cheddar and Monterrey Jack, all the while thinking it was heavy on the cheese. When I pulled the puff pastry out of the freezer, I discovered to my horror it was not puff pastry at all but phyllo. I have never ever been adept enough to work with phyllo and all that butter. I prefer to buy my spanakopita once a year when the Greek Orthodox Church has its annual festival. When I do make spanakopita, I use puff pastry—traditional Greek cooks would be horrified. Besides, the phyllo had apparently been in the freezer so long, it was dry (a no-no) and flaking. I threw it away.

Clearly, this dinner was not going well.

I just knew I had puff pastry, so I dug into an entire shelf in the freezer, puling everything out, and sure enough—at the very back of the shelf, buried under everything, was a box of puff pastry. Frozen solid. I left it out to defrost and took a nap.

When I woke up I made the cream sauce for the spinach and then tested the pastry. It was workable. So a huge question: how should I portion this out? With crescent rolls, there’s no question: you get eight little triangles. It did occur to me that the triangles were indeed little, and I had a whole lot of filling by this time. I settled on separating the puff pastry into three pieces into which it is naturally folded.

One at a time, I rolled a piece out as wide and long as I could and then figured I could get two roll-ups out of each third of pastry. But unlike the triangles, I didn’t know what to do with these almost square pieces of dough. So the first two, I flattened the filling and dough—most unattractive. So with the next, I mounded the filling and pulled the dough corners over the filling as you would with a puff package. Better, but far from neat. When I pinched the corners to be sure none of the cheese filling oozed out, the packages took on weird shapes. I kept remembering my mom’s words: Food is half eaten with the eye. This food, I thought, would best be eaten blindfolded. But I persevered, and my last two efforts were—well, medium at best.

I put the pastries in the oven before Mary arrived, because as I’ve said I can’t cook two things at once—that trips a circuit, and the entire cottage goes dark. So they came out soon after Mary arrived, and her first words were, “Those look gorgeous.” Well, pick me up off the floor!

I squeezed the spinach dry (absolutely the worst part of making creamed spinach) and tossed it with the now-cooled sauce (the now-cooled part meant it was a lot harder to blend, but it finally worked). Somehow, I served a reasonable supper—chicken roll-ups and creamed spinach. It didn’t look too bad, and Mary raved about the taste of both. Of course, now I had a lot of filling left over in the fridge—chicken roll-ups, anyone?

Would I ever do this again? (So many of my experiments are one-time things). The spinach is a recipe I’ve used before with great success, so the question doesn’t apply. But the roll-ups? Yes, and I’d use puff pastry instead of crescent rolls—lighter, fluffier crust. And I’d cut down on the three cheeses—too much fillin. What I’d need to do is figure out a better way of making the roll-ups or pockets or whatever you want to call them. And it occurs to me the filling recipe I have for tuna pasties would be great in puff pastry pockets. Obviously, there’s more experimenting ahead.

Want to know the best part? Besides doing this today and getting a good afternoon nap, I wrote a thousand words on a project I’m playing with Not a bad Monday at all.