Can this food be saved?: past-its-prime spinach
photo: spinach soup–it’s all the rage with the preschool set (today, at any rate)
As I mentioned last week, we’ve been doing some thinning out at the community garden plot. Some of the spinach had gotten quite large and was starting to bolt, so we stripped it, stuffed it into a couple of bags, and stuck it in the fridge. Then I got busy and it sat there for a week. Or was that nearly two? Oops!
I tentatively stuck my nose in the bags yesterday and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had feared. Greens picked from the garden will last way longer than those you buy from the store because they haven’t taken a week or longer to get to you (incidentally, your risk of getting sick from home-grown greens is also way smaller than commercially-grown greens, although you still need to take sensible precautions while growing and preparing them). You wouldn’t want to make a salad out of the leaves in my fridge at this point–the leaves were rather mature to be eaten raw, some of it was wilting a bit (ok, a few of them were wilting a lot), and there were some yellow/damaged leaves which needed to be culled. It didn’t look real pretty, but overall it was still perfectly edible–a perfect candidate for soup.
I made a very quick and easy cream of spinach soup for lunch from Joy of Cooking: All About Vegetarian Cooking (2 minutes of chopping, 8 minutes of stirring, 5 minutes of casual supervision/pureeing resulted in 2 meals’ worth of soup). The recipe isn’t available online so I won’t infringe copyright, but I would highly recommend any spinach soup recipe that features nutmeg. My nearly-3-year-old got up from her nap and immediately requested a second cup of it for her snack (I suspect the fact that her daddy grew it made it a big draw!).
I’m expecting another couple bags of soup-grade spinach to be lugged home today or tomorrow, so there will be plenty of opportunity for further experimentation. Chilled pea and spinach soup? Spinach and chickpea soup? It’s so satisfying making a delicious meal out of something that you might unthinkingly throw out just because it doesn’t look ‘perfect’, and the possibilities are really endless.
July 28th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
I too had a jungle of spinach and chard to deal with and forgot a third cloth shopping bag in the back porch for a day or so - it all had so much moisture in the stems that you’d barely even know it hadn’t just been picked, let alone not refrigerated. I sauteed some shallots and little red onions and garlics from Wally’s at the market and dumped all the leaves into the pot to let them wilt and cook down. I added a bit of liquid (vegetable water that I had in the freezer, the most important good soup secret learned from my grandma - don’t ever dump the water you cook veggies in! I always have a container in the freezer ready to drain into and then I get unsurpassed flavour when I make soup or stock), whizzed in some leftover whipped potatoes, and a little milk to stretch it. Nothing more than salt and pepper and it was soooo good.