I don’t know how your week has been. I don’t do pumpkin spice (except when my American nieces visit and we make pumpkin pie together) but I’m sending you happy autumn wishes of crisp apples and warming drinks and goldy-orange leaves and the scent of fried sage.

If you need cheering up as the seasons change, may I recommend making a big spinach pie? While you wait for the spinach to wilt, spend 4 minutes watching Judy Garland singing 'Embraceable You' on YouTube, a Gershwin song from the 1943 movie Girl Crazy.

For no particular reason, I’ve had a couple of shaky days. Maybe it’s the news. In any case, I was steadied by making a giant crispy and buttery spinach pie for dinner one night and I wanted to share the recipe with you because a large filo pie is so much easier to make than anyone imagines before they make it for the first time and once it’s made, you will get so many meals from it, whether breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Filo is pastry at its most hopeful and forgiving. This is a pie that can’t go wrong even if it goes wrong. Rips and tears are nothing to stress about. Just add another layer and no one will know. If only all mistakes were so easy to fix. As you can see from my photos below, sometimes a bit of spinach oozes out of the top when you don’t add quite enough layers but this also doesn’t spoil the pleasure of eating it one jot.

Our most recent pie did double duty the next day for my son’s lunch to take in a box with him to college. There’s such a cosy feeling, knowing that your child is eating spinach pie in between classes with his friends while you are eating the exact same pie at home between deadlines. Wholesome is how my daughter would describe this. Have you noticed that gen Z are always calling things ‘wholesome’ not as an insult but as a compliment? I love it! It makes me feel that my boring middle-aged enthusiasms are less dull than I thought.

I’ve been aware that spinach pies can bring joy ever since my friend Ingrid’s wedding in South Africa, when the huge spinach pies made by her mother were meant to be strictly for vegetarians only. There was an array of barbecued meats for non-vegetarians. But the spinach pies were what many meat eaters sneakily gravitated towards for their irresistible combination of green filling and buttery pastry.

I remembered those wedding pies after my mother died three years ago and my sister and I had to organise her funeral in Oxford, at St Barnabas church. This church had been faithfully in her life for more than fifty years. I learned to crawl on the shiny parquet floor here.

Once we had decided on the music for the service, the main thing I obsessed about was the food. We knew that there wasn’t much scope for elaborate catering in the church but thinking of my mother's friends I also knew that grief does strange things to the appetite and sometimes a bite of something properly filling and substantial is the only thing that helps.

It was the greatest stroke of good fortune when a nearby Greek café – Manos Fresh Food Bar on Walton street - agreed to provide spinach pies, moussaka and more. When Manos dropped off his huge spinach pies half an hour before the service began, they were piping hot; he had calculated that by the time we ate them an hour and a half later they would be the perfect degree of warmth. It was a strange sad comfort to see my mother’s friends eating spinach pie and drinking the champagne she used to buy for special parties, standing at the back of the church on that shiny wooden floor where I once crawled and clung on to her ankles.

There isn’t a spinach pie I don’t like, from tiny vegan Lebanese triangles stuffed with pine nuts, fried onions and sumac to an Italian Easter Torta Pasqualina with whole eggs and ricotta. But the memory of the Manos pies means that the Greek spanakopita versions with cheese are the ones I now crave. Any time I’m back in Oxford, I return to Manos for a slice.

A Big Spinach Pie

Makes around 20 squares, enough to feed 8-10

I can’t think of spinach pies without turning to the books of Claudia Roden, who has given us dozens of different versions reflecting the many spinach pies of the Mediterranean, from coiled Turkish börek to filo triangles from Egypt. My starting point here was her ‘Large Spinach Pie In A Tray’ from Tamarind and Saffron but as well as tinkering with the amount of butter and spinach very slightly, I increased the amount of nutmeg (because I adore it) as well as the feta and cottage cheese because I find that if I only use 2/3 pack of fresh white cheeses, I tend to waste the rest.

900g fresh spinach

200g feta cheese

200g while milk cottage cheese

¼-1/2 tsp fine salt

Black pepper

4 eggs

30g dill, washed and finely chopped

Half a nutmeg, grated

Around 270g filo pastry (1 pack – see note)

80g unsalted butter, melted or 80g extra-virgin olive oil (I much prefer this with butter but oil works too)

Note on buying filo: I buy fresh filo from a local independent Turkish or Syrian food shop - see below. It’s worth stocking up because it keeps for ages. The sheets are so much finer and bigger than the supermarket kind (whether Jus-Rol or M & S) and the packs weigh closer to 500g than the British supermarket ones which are 270g. My son calls supermarket filo ‘beginner filo’ because it’s so easy to handle and you need fewer layers because it’s thick; the downside is it can be a bit over-crispy and mouth-stabbing when it’s cooked. But it still makes a very delicious pie so don’t worry too much either way.

Wash the spinach by running it under cold water in a colander. Cut off any hard stems and if the leaves are large, chop them (no need to chop the baby spinach most supermarkets sell).

No matter how many times you do it, it’s hard to fathom how a bag of spinach can start off so huge and end up so tiny. Get your largest saute pan out (mine is 30cm in diameter) or a large saucepan if that’s what you have. Add half the spinach and cook with the lid on for a couple of minutes. Now add the rest of the spinach and put the lid back on until it has all crumpled down to a soft mass. There will be what seems like an insane amount of murky green liquid in the pan. Drain the spinach in a sieve over a bowl. To make sure the spinach is properly dry, return it to the pan over heat for a couple more minutes. In a big mixing bowl, whisk together the eggs, cheeses, salt, dill, pepper, nutmeg, using a fork to mash the cheeses into the rest of the ingredients. Stir in the spinach.

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C fan.

Take a medium-large roasting tin (mine is 34cm by 28cm). Brush it with some melted butter or oil and add a layer of filo pastry, leaving an overhang at the edges. Keep layering up the filo pastry, brushing each layer with more butter until you have what looks like a sturdy enough surface to contain the spinach. With the supermarket filo, this may be around 4 sheets but with the thinner more authentic filo it takes 7-9 layers. Add the spinach filling and fold over the overhang. Add a final few layers of pastry over the top, again painting each layer with more butter or oil. With a sharp knife, cut out 5 cm squares, only cutting through the top pastry and the filling, not through to the bottom. Bake until crisp and beautifully burnished gold, the colour of a dark Van Gogh sunflower, for about 45 minutes (but start checking after 35).