A Tribute To Spanakopita

I usually eat in the dining hall, where they have a never-ending supply of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers and cabbage, plus oil, vinegar, bread, feta, and of course, meat. However, I sometimes reach the breaking point, where I just can't stand to see one more plate of the same stuff. So I branch out. A lot of times, branching out means pites.
Pites are not what they sound like to American ears. When I hear "pita", I think of the pocketed bread that you serve with hummus. In Greek, however, "pita" means "pie", as in a pie made of filo dough, stuffed with various things. The most popular ones are Tiropita, (cheese pie), and Spanikopita (spinach pie).
I had never heard of tiropita before I came to Greece, but I had definitely heard of spanikopita, in several contexts. First, there are a number of Greek and middle eastern places that serve it in New York. Second, the Grinnell Dining Hall used to serve it, and if you called the menu hotline, you could hear the dining hall lady announce, in her very American twang, that dinner was Spanako-PI-ta. It's really pronounced with the accent on the "KO", as spanaKOpita. This is a demonstration of the most important rule for English speakers learning Greek, which is as follows: Whenever you see a new word, read it aloud to yourself, paying close attention to the place where you, as an English speaker, naturally place the accent. Then put the accent somewhere else, because you are definitely wrong.
Anyway, spanakopita, in my opinion, is a useful food. You can eat it for breakfast, lunch or dinner, and it has vegetables (spinach), carbohydrates (dough), and sometimes protein (if you get the kind with cheese). Also, it usually has plenty of oil. In other words, it's a complete meal. Close enough, anyway. And it's readily available everywhere, from the Anatolia canteen to every other shop in the downtown area.
Of course, there are a number of places that sell Bougatsa, which is another Filo dough based pie food, also filled with spinach, cheese, creme and/or other assorted substances with varying degrees of nutritional value. A Greek friend tells me that pitas and bougatsa are very different. I personally cannot detect a major difference, but I'm going to take his word for it, since I have been known to fuss at length about the minor differences between New York pizza parlors, Indian Restaurants, or bagel stores. (Patsy's in East Harlem, the Jackson Diner in Jackson Heights and Absolut Bagels on 107th and Broadway beat everything else hands down, and that's all there is to it.)