Doughnuts??

I've posted before about how much my oldest loves spinach pies. We were supposed to make some a couple of weeks ago, but I used the onion in another dish...forgot to get feta at the grocery...then the thawed spinach sat in the fridge for way too many days and I gave up. But she's been bugging me ever since.

I haven't been myself lately. I have been getting treatment for a displaced disk in my jaw, which has been giving me a near constant headache for about 5 weeks so far. So my time in the kitchen has been limited. Our nutrition (and wallet) has been suffering for it. Plus, we had the promise of ice cream cake for dessert to celebrate our first daughter's birthday-in-heaven. So without a trip to the grocery store, what to have for dinner? Big bag of meatballs, and a peck of rainbow peppers to the rescue. But Dani doesn't eat peppers, so she bugged me again about the spinach pies.

Oh, baby, I am tired. The kitchen is a mess. And spinach pies take a long time. It's already 6:00...fine. How can we do this, quick in a hurry, without adding to the mess of the kitchen? Hmmm, the doughnut maker is still on the counter from Sunday morning when we made peanut butter doughnuts with chocolate glaze (look up a cake mix doughnut recipe on Pinterest...add 1/2 cup melted peanut butter. Glaze is powdered sugar, cocoa powder, melted butter and water). What if we....?

I quickly looked on Pinterest to see if anyone has ever done this before, cooking spinach pies in a doughnut maker. Nope. Maybe in a waffle iron? Nope. I did find a recipe for spinach and feta fritters that looked similar to my spinach pie recipe with some flour added. Well, why not?

I mixed up a modified version of my Mini Spinach Pies and added a scoop of flour. Preheated the doughnut maker, sprayed it with some cooking spray and mounded the spinach mixture in the wells. The first batch, I kept peeking and poking. Dani said we should flip one out and test it so we did. It worked! I timed the second batch to see just how long it takes...8 minutes. Eight minutes! And I don't have to wash out 48 tiny muffin tin wells when we are done?? Hallelujah!!

In that 8 minutes, I whipped up a dipping sauce for me and Ken with some mayo, sour cream, lemon zest, parsley, oregano, salt and pepper. But these little "spindonuts" would be delicious with some tzatziki. The whole surface of the doughnut gets a bit of a crust on it, so it is a bit of a different texture of the mini muffin tin. I don't think I'm going back. Ken and I do try to stick to a paleo diet most of the time, so I will try these with a different flour one day. In the meantime, we aren't so strict that a tablespoon or two of flour is a deal-breaker.

Now, what is next in the doughnut maker? Any suggestions?