smitten kitchen » Spinach

the best baked spinach

deb — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:45:59 +0000

On a beach vacation that already feels like it was too long ago, I tucked into the collection of letters between Julia Child and Avis DeVoto and realized I’d inadvertently brought on vacation with me the very best book ever for my current brand of mental unevenness. Apparently, even the great Julia Child went a little insane writing her cookbook. She fretted over if varied and uneven ingredients would keep her recipes from working as she wanted them to in others’ kitchens and even had occasional bouts of frustration with her tiny, ill-equipped kitchens. And Julia is like my superhero! I was no less than 10 pages in when I already felt better about my choices, the work I had left, life itself, the universe at large… or perhaps it was just those no-good piña coladas and that blue-meets-blue horizon working their magic on me. Nevertheless, I thanked Julia.

In one of my favorite early letters, Julia gushes about the produce in France: “Strawberries, for instance, are dreamberries, but extremely fragile.* Beans are so deliciously beany…” and goes on to explain that the French hadn’t really gotten onto the system of growing hardier produce that would keep longer in the markets. Amusingly, however, she found U.S. packages of spinach at the grocery store and it from there that she went on a tangent about a French “system” for spinach which she found “terribly good” and went on to describe a gentle cooking of spinach, stewing it in a very small amount of roux for a little binding and broth before stirring in a small amount of cheese and baking it in a dish topped with breadcrumbs.

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cabbage and lime salad with roasted peanuts

deb — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 03:35:23 +0000

I know that on the surface, peering in from your side of the computer screen, this looks like a pile of shredded cabbage, a poorly lit one (look, it was late, okay?). But from my site, from my seat right here, this is pretty much the best thing ever, a yearly event I like to call First Slaw of the Season.

Yes, friends, rooftop grilling season is back (or it was, er, briefly last Saturday afternoon but not really by Saturday evening, when we shivered around the actual grill; details) and I could not possibly be more excited. That means summer is coming. That means Jacob and I get to go to barbecues as separate human beings this summer (aw). That means that this one, the adult one, gets to have a beer (yay).

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spinach and chickpeas

deb — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:26:41 +0000

First off, this dish is not called “spinach and chickpeas”, it is espinacas con garbanzos. Don’t you agree? “Spinach and chickpeas” is something you eat because you should — it is healthy and you aspire to be. Espinacas con garbanzos is something you eat because it sounds sexy, and doesn’t taste half bad either. It’s hearty and smoky with a little kick, you eat it on little fried bread toasts at a tapas bar in Spain.

Or, you know, in New York City on another brutally rainy March night. My friend Ang had a tapas pot-luck last Friday (the baby ditched us for a better party at his grandparents house) and, yes, I brought a Spanish dish to a Spanish party that did not include a single format of pork. Wild! Hey, I figured others would have the chorizos and jamón serranos covered. Me, I wanted some Spanish comfort food. I’d tried a version of this dish a few years ago, thanks to the sweet nudging of Ximena at Lobstersquad and instantly loved it. It sounds like it would be too simple to hold your interest, perhaps something you’d eat because you “ought” to, but it tastes like something you’ll crave again and again.

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spinach and cheese strata

deb — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:27:40 +0000

I have spent the last few months unearthing recipes I’ve had bookmarked for an eternity. A whole lot of them, mostly things I have spared you, did not exactly age like fine wine, as they say; fillings ran, vegetables never caramelized, spiced mixed nuts were grimy and cookies were painfully sweet. The rest of them, however, caused me to become consumed with regret when I think of all of the times we could have already consumed mindblowing butterscotch, caviar-esque creamed mushrooms and speedy, rich biscuits but did not know of them yet. This is one of those times.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m all about hosting brunch, but only if I can make everything in advance. When it comes to biscuits, bacon, baked French toast and fruit salads, pulling it off is obvious. But I always get lost on the eggs, and for a whole lot of people, it’s not breakfast if it doesn’t involve eggs. This strata — really, a savory bread pudding — is the missing piece because not only can you make it the night before, you are supposed to.

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creamed spinach

deb — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:26:48 +0000

I started fixin’ for some creamed spinach when I was pregnant — yes, they aren’t kidding about those iron cravings — but I never got to making it this summer. Because I didn’t have… time. Now, just pause for a second while I reach through this computer to throttle my summer self for thinking she knew what not having time was all about.

Then I had a baby and I was still craving creamed spinach but, you know, then I had a baby and really didn’t have time. And a week passed and then a month and a second month after that and on the very first day of his third month of life I was still drooling over an imaginary bowl of creamed spinach and decided enough was enough.

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spanakopita triangles + then some

deb — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:43:24 +0000

Apparently, making marshmallows at home isn’t as “normal” as I would have thought, but then again, I am the last person one should be using a yardstick of kitchen normality, or not as long as I am pickling grapes or making wedding cakes with a mini-oven and a single, eensy counter.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that my brand of crazy will match yours, however. I mean, someone actually asked if was going to make my own phyllo next. Are they mad? I hate working with phyllo. Who invented this stuff? It’s fragile and fussy and requires a ludicrous amount of manual labor, and then it leaves papery flakes of pastry everywhere, but mostly on this abdomen shelf I’m growing (sorry, kid. One day you’ll be more than just a crumb catcher! Just not today.)

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spinach quiche, revisited

deb — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 17:58:55 +0000

The strangest thing has happened to me this summer; my obsessive pining for the next new recipe has waned. Gone are the days when the thought of cooking something I have already made was enough to make me not cook at all. Instead, it seems that this site is finally working for me: I have an archive of recipes I adore, largely ones that work as they should, and the answer to “What should we have for dinner?” is now, quite frequently, “Ooh, those kefta meatballs were so good. Let’s have them again!”

Eager to break the routine of working and eating by myself nearly every single day since I began freelancing this summer, I had a friend over for lunch on Friday, but I also had a lot of work to get done that day. Was this the time to make that new savory tart I have been eying for the fall? No. Was this time to go to the store and buy more stuff, when our refrigerator was already brimming with the remnants of our North Fork farmers’ markets finds the weekend before? No.

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baked eggs + chive biscuits + bloody marys

deb — Mon, 14 May 2007 01:49:56 +0000

Today, I have failed you as a food blogger. I’m not proud. I cooked and cooked, we and our loved ones ate like kings, there was not a single recipe that shouldn’t be archived and returned to and yet, in the whirl of things we forgot to pick up the camera. (Hangs head in shame.) You get no photographic evidence of the shredded hash browns, chive biscuits, egregious amount of thick-cut maple-cured bacon, baked almond-orange French toast, insanely spicy bloody marys, plain yogurt I flavored myself with real vanilla and just a pinch of sugar. You’re just going to have to trust me that it was grand.

Since we’ve been together Alex and I have twice taken our mothers and those dudes they married for Mother’s Day brunches. I’m not going to say that we haven’t had good meals, but we’ve never had a great one. No matter who cooks it (and really, it’s always a short order cook; the chef with his/her name on the menu isn’t called in six hours early just to flip eggs), in the end most brunch menus look exactly alike and with the prices jacked up for the holiday, you’ve got to question the sanity of a $50 over-cooked egg. I don’t overcook my eggs, do you? And yet I’ll pay someone else to, and to serve bacon that’s never quite crisp. My bacon is always crisp.

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spinach quiche

deb — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 14:33:41 +0000

After a week that felt nothing short of chaotic and angsty, this weekend was just what the over-tangled brain ordered. Saturday, we headed to the surprisingly-empty and orchre-tinted foliage deprived Brooklyn Botanic Garden for a few hours. Still, wandering around snapping up this and that to contribute my quota of flower pictures to the internet was turned out to be exactly the antidote my week called for.

Alas, no day could be perfect without cooking for the people I love, I insisted upon pulling together dinner for my husband and sister-in-law before heading out to see The Prestige. Along with the reheated stinktastic galette leftovers and the best pantry staple, Caesar salad, in some sort of miracle I managed to get my favorite quiche together in under an hour. I’ve been making this spinach quiche for so long, I feel almost possessive of it, forgetting that that somewhere, other people must too, and now I am encouraging you, also. It’s fantastically simple, three everyday cheeses, some green onions and a box of frozen spinach, and keeps so well, it’s actually tastier the next day, with the flavors cool, settled and happily enmeshed. Don’t be put off by its overly-healthy and wholesome appearance, it tastes like a treat and I can’t wait to feast on it with a green salad for lunch this week.

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