Food: The First Spinach
by tristero
So I had a spare 30 minutes or so – as well as a ton of spinach lying around for no good reason – and so I decided to try this simple White House recipe for “No Cream Creamed Spinach” by Cristeta Comerford:
No Cream Creamed Spinach
Serves 62 pounds baby spinach, washed and cleaned
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 shallots, minced
2 garlic cloves, minced
Salt and freshly ground pepper.1. Blanch half a pound of spinach in salted, boiling water. Immediately, “shock” the blanched spinach in a bowl of iced water. Drain and squeeze out the excess water. Puree in a blender. Set aside.
2. In a large skillet, sweat the shallots and garlic until translucent. Add the rest of the spinach leaves. Toss and sauté until wilted. Fold in the spinach puree. Season with salt and pepper.
A few comments:
First of all, it is delicious. Amazing what simple preparation and proper cooking can do for a dish I used to dread like the plague.
Ms. Comerford doesn’t give timings and heat so this is approximate. I blanched the spinach for about 1 1/2 minutes in the (well-) salted boiling water. I used medium heat and cooked the shallots for, oh, about 5 minutes plus, I think. The spinach (I used grown-up, not baby, spinach) took quite a while to wilt down – maybe 10 minutes, maybe longer. There seems to be a magic spot to stop cooking the stuff before it turns to mush, but you do have to get the water out of it and that takes a while.
Now, one thing to look out for, which is probably patently obvious to experienced cooks. You can’t puree blanched, shocked spinach in a blender, at least not in mine. Within a tenth of a second, centrifugal force slammed the spinach onto to the sides of the blender, out of reach of the blades. Scraping it back down and pureeing again gives you another 1/10th second of pureeing and after you do that four or five times, you’ve got chunky spinach, not a fine puree. So then you start to think that maybe your time would be better spent writing a post in which you carefully discuss the problems with Richard Perle’s worldview… Nah, it’s far more intellectually challenging to wrestle with a blender. So back you go and eventually you end up with something reasonably puree-like.
Not that it matters if what comes out of the blender isn’t perfect. The resulting texture is smooth, creamy, and tasty. Go ahead. Try it.
Note: If you think this isn’t a post about politics, then you don’t know Jack about politics in 21st Century America.