I do not like to travel, yet somehow, I've traveled a lot, usually against my will. It was kicking and screaming that I ended up in Greece five years ago on my first (and only) press trip. I'm not talking about a press tour, like how the Marvel actors have to circle the globe to promote the latest Avengers Space Battle For The Universe, or whatever. Press trips are offered to reporters (and I guess, these days, influencers?) and paid for by tourism boards with the hopes they'll write (or gram/tweet/tok?) about how awesome a place is. Ever notice how sometimes it seems like everyone is traveling to the same time at the same place? Yup, that's what's going on.
I hate any kerfuffles in my routine, have a hard time sleeping on a different mattress, and every time I fly, I assume I'm gonna die, so yeah, I'm not a good traveler. The schedule on this Greece trip was packed. After flying into Athens, we took a bus to a different city (and mattress) almost every night, so basically my nightmare. Sorry, I don't remember the names of any places or even how long I was there. After day three anywhere, my brain always goes into full meltdown mode and I tend to hate everything and everyone around me. (I only start to settle in and like a place after at least two weeks, at which point I never want to leave.)
One of the towns we visited was up in the mountains. The front and rear of the bus hung off the cliff as we drove up the tight winding road, so I decided to come to terms with the fact that I would probably die here. We had to hike up to a farm along a muddy road, and the closer we got, the more intense the stench of manure grew. Did I tell you I'm not an outdoorsy kinda girl, or could you guess from my East Village lifestyle? Once we arrived, I headed straight to the red and white wine table. My favorite thing about Europe is being around people who drink like me. Since the other people on the trip were "serious" journalists, I had all the wine to myself. They had us taste olives while hearing a long lecture about how Greek olives are the best. We tasted olive oil with freshly baked bread, got a pottery lesson, plucked cherries right off the tree, spitting the pits onto piles of manure, and petted some goats. This would melt any average person's heart, but I was on day five, or maybe seven, of not sleeping in my bed (so, not sleeping) and in full rage mode. I just wanted to drink enough wine to stop worrying about the drive down the mountain.
But then I saw one of the cooks on the farm demonstrate how to make phyllo dough from scratch. Phyllo are tissue-thin sheets of wheat dough, usually layered with butter or olive oil before baking into crisp, flaky, crunchy, golden pastries. And I mean, see your face through it, lift it too quickly and it tears, leave it uncovered for a second and it disintegrates, thin. I've never made it myself and have always used the frozen sheets from the grocery store. She used a long wooden rolling pin, as lengthy as the Italian mattarello used for handmade pasta but slender like the Chinese dowels used for dumpling wrappers. A lump of dough smaller than a ping pong ball outstretched to the width of my coffee table in a matter of seconds through a combo move of rolling, stretching, and pulling. She asked if anyone wanted to try, and I had drunk just enough wine to say yes, but not so much that I would embarrass myself. Of course, she made it look easier than it was, but I was not half bad.
In that instant, my mood immediately shifted, and I decided I liked Greece. She layered the phyllo sheets with olive oil in a wide handleless black steel skillet that looked like a paella pan. Then, in a large bowl, she tossed together various tender greens and herbs just harvested from the farm—loads of dill, swiss chard, peppery watercress and nasturtium leaves, and a few other native Greek greens I don't remember. She massaged them all with salt and that olive oil we tasted, before tossing with feta and trahanas, a coarse pebbly crumb that soaked up the liquid released from the greens. Trahanas is a fermented wheat and dairy porridge that's dried and broken into bits, ready to instantly hydrate like couscous in soups and, in this case, spanakopita. After adding the greens to the phyllo-lined pan, she draped over a few more sheets of phyllo to cover and baked it in a wood-fired oven.
We all sat down to eat the spanakopita (and other stuff I don't remember), and maybe it was because I was already a bottle of red deep, but I forgot about the manure stench and even the flies. That pie with just made phyllo and just harvested greens and just pressed olive oil was one of the best things I ever ate. This time of year, I always make lots of spanakopita with whatever I can find at the market. Sometimes I'll even get a bag of trahanas online, or I'll just use couscous or bulgur. I still hate traveling and do way more of it than I want against my will, yet on every trip, I learn something that I carry forever. I guess (shrugs in millennial) that makes it worth it. My recipe for spanakopita has changed over the years, but I shared the latest on the Today show earlier this week if you want to check it out here. It definitely helps to drink an entire bottle of wine first.