I love communal dinners where dishes can be placed in the middle of the table and served family-style for siblings to pass to one another. There’s a lovely feeling around taking part in a meal. It is almost ceremonial. In the past year, we’ve seen dinner time really become quite the focus of the day, especially as more people worked from home.
The lunchtime stroll to get a sandwich became a wander into the kitchen to make toast. The appetite (excuse the pun) for new and exciting dinner recipes was huge. It was fantastic to see so many people cooking and taking an interest in what they were creating each evening in their own homes.
One of my favourite communal dinners was on our wedding day a few years ago. I had seen the wonderful Eunice Power create a Middle Eastern supper club in Cafe Idaho in Cork a few years previously and I just loved the platters of brightly coloured food bursting with flavour. Eunice always has incredible attention to detail and makes everything look as stunning as it tastes. I just knew she would be the perfect person to create our wedding feast. Along with her talented team, they barbecued outside, spread hummus, assembled pavlovas, dolloped lemon curd and scattered petals.
One of the main courses that Eunice made for us that day was the chicken pastilla from Honey & Co in London. The gently spiced filo pastry pie is filled with slow-cooked chicken thighs, dates and onions in a rich gravy. It's really something special, so I've created a version that uses leftover turkey. It removes a few time-consuming steps from the original recipe that it was inspired by. Turkey has such amazing flavour but it can be dry, so using leftovers like this really works well.
As most of us are having smaller gatherings this year, there will be an inevitable amount of leftovers. I always find leftovers are best dealt with right away. Remove all of the meat from the turkey carcass and freeze what you won’t use in the following few days.
A turkey sandwich is almost compulsory, but I usually make a Thai-style soup with the remainder, simmering the shredded turkey meat low and slow with spiced coconut milk.
TURKEY PASTILLA
Serves four to six
Ingredients
1 tbsp butter
3 onions, peeled and finely sliced
1 stick cinnamon
½ tsp dried red chilli flakes
2 tbsp ras-el-hanout (or similar North African spice mix)
350g cooked turkey, shredded
6 pitted dates
1 tsp black pepper
1½ tsp sea salt
1 packet filo pastry
250ml water
¼ cup melted butter (or oil/other fat if avoiding dairy)
Method
1 Heat your oven to 180 degrees. Sauté the onion in a pan with a tablespoon of butter. Lower the heat and place on the lid, leave it to caramelise for 10-15 minutes till the onions become golden.
2 Stir through the salt, pepper, spice mix, chilli flakes and cinnamon stick. Add the shredded turkey and dates, stirring well to combine. Pour over the water and simmer everything until it becomes rich and thick. Set aside and remove the cinnamon stick. Taste for seasoning.
3 Brush a springform tin with melted butter and lay on two sheets of filo pastry. Brush with butter and add an extra sheet of pastry on top. Lay the sheets so that they criss-cross over one another. Use up all the sheets in this way, brushing with butter and layering. Keep one sheet for the top.
4 Add all of the turkey mix to the tin. Lay the final pastry sheet over, brush with butter then gather all of the corners and fold them over on top of one another.
5 Bake for 20-25 minutes until golden.
