You are here: Home |
Cooking spinach my waySpinach at its best is quite simply sublime. Unfortunately, a great deal of less-than-sublime spinach appears in the markets and shops these days. Rule One: if you think you have enough you probably haven’t. It takes a mountain of the raw vegetable to produce a molehill when cooked, so always buy more than you think you’re going to need. Rule Two: cook spinach with as little water as possible and then get rid of as much as possible of what’s left, because the part of the mountain that doesn’t end up in the molehill is - you guessed it - water. When I was in Tuscany a few years ago I found very useful balls of pre-cooked spinach. Someone had obviously done all the dreary bits - trimming, washing and cooking, and then squeezed conveniently-sized dollops in a cloth to get rid of all that water. You could get these spinach balls, wrapped in clingfilm, in the greengrocer’s shop at the next crossroads on the Siena ring-road from our place, and even at the Siena Co-op supermarket (this is not a joke). They were brilliant. You just melted some butter in a saucepan, dropped in the ball of spinach and mashed it around with a wooden spoon until hot, finally seasoning to taste with salt and pepper. Magic. Living as I do in a less civilised country, I usually end up buying big cellophane (or whatever the stuff is) bags from the supermarket. Sometimes this is pre-washed with the recommendation that you microwave it in the bag. Other bags are labelled with the warning to ‘Wash well before cooking’. The reason for this will be obvious to anyone familiar with raw spinach: it seems to have endless places in which soil and grit can hide. So here’s what I do with spinach bought bagged or loose... Method
When the spinach is hot, season to taste with salt (not too much - I once had to leave a portion of superb spinach in a local Italian restaurant because it had been over-salted) and pepper. If the spinach doesn’t have much of that wonderful spinach flavour, there isn’t a great deal you can do about it. However, a generous addition of freshly-grated nutmeg will make it less boring. |
Personal site for Paul Marsden: frustrated writer; experimental cook and all-round foodie; amateur wine-importer; former copywriter and press-officer; former teacher, teacher-trainer, educational software developer and documenter; still a professional web-developer but mostly retired. This site was transferred in June 2005 to the Sites4Doctors Site Management System, and has been developed and maintained there ever since. |
|