Phyllo

Try this deep-dish pumpkin pie when you need to please both traditional and modern palates at the Thanksgiving table. Adding Chinese five-spice powder to the filling may seem unorthodox, but two of its components (cinnamon and clove) can already be found in standard pumpkin-pie spice. The dramatic crust is delightfully easy to create—just brush butter onto sheets of store-bought phyllo and layer them at different angles in the pan. Finish with freshly whipped cream, and you'll have one mighty fine, crowd-pleasing dessert.

Give chicken potpie the spring treatment. This light, bright recipe is like shedding winter layers. The fancy-looking poufs are just sheets of phyllo dough brushed with butter and scrunched into crackly balls. When baked, they become an extra-crunchy topping for the tarragon-scented filling of shredded chicken, artichokes, and leeks. 

The crust is most crisp the day it's made, but the pie without the whipped-cream topping and chocolate shavings can be made up to a day ahead and stored in the refrigerator. To cut the pie into neat slices, use a serrated knife.

The many buttered layers of phyllo dough, walnut filling, and sweet syrup make baklava the ultimate special-occasion dessert in Greece.

This Greek-style dish can be assembled and then frozen for up to three months. When you're ready to bake, it can go straight from the freezer into the oven.

This ode to a classic Greek galatopita, or milk pie, will knock the socks off your friends who order pumpkin-spice everything. It's also the ideal project to start with if you're new to baking with phyllo: you simply brush sheets of it with clarified butter, scrunch them into accordion-like shapes, and arrange them in a spiral in the pan. This recipe comes from Martha Stewart's Fruit Desserts: 100+ Ways to Savor the Best of Every Season ($24.49, amazon.com).

A handful of tweaks turn this comfort food into a smarter choice: white-meat chicken (not dark), extra veggies, low-fat milk in the filling, and a lighter crust. Brushing the phyllo with just a small amount of oil instead of butter makes it just as tasty.

Layers of paper-thin buttery phyllo overlap to form a delicate base for a sweet potato souffle.

Layering pecans between sheets of store-bought phyllo adds a nice crunch to this tart's flaky foundation.

Blistered shishito peppers are filled with a rich, salty mixture of feta and cream cheese, then wrapped in phyllo dough and baked until puffed and golden. A sprinkling of sesame seeds gives the finger food a wonderful nutty finish.

Quick to make and easy to love, this treat uses store-bought phyllo shells as the vessel for a filling of silky homemade lemon curd. 

The cilantro here is fragrant even after cooking, and the vegetables' sweetness is offset by the toasted spices. Roasting beets provides more intense flavor but requires peeling them raw, which can leave hands red; consider wearing gloves.