Spinach baby!

The following scenario is all too common these days.

The panic button is hit. What will I make for dinner tonight? Somehow (HA!) the day has escaped me and it is 4:30 and I am just thinking about our dinner. Easy comes to mind first. Pasta? Chicken? What is in the fridge? Do I dare dig into the freezer? Ugh. Microwave defrost. Hate it. Ok, fresh. Look out the window and there is the answer. Spinach. Lots of spinach, but not quite as much as I should have planted.

Last year this crop was VERY plentiful, however, due to my morning/afternoon/evening sickness, I couldn't enjoy it. My three little rows seem like an emerald gift under the cloche. I wish I planted more. It would lead to more quick meals.

This particular night we BBQed some chicken and I plucked several handfuls of spinach from the garden.

A quick rinse and it could be a delicious salad. Today we continue on to the stove top.

A spritz of olive oil and 3 crushed cloves of garlic are thrown into the fry pan. After the garlic started to sizzle, I added all of the spinach in and sautéd it. Done!

The end product shows why I need to plant more. It takes a lot for a side dish.

So when in doubt about what you are going to make for dinner, think fresh first and build the rest of your menu from there. Most of all remember that you can NEVER go wrong with olive oil and garlic.

Spinach, Cookbooks and Spinach Ricotta Pie

This is the spinach that grew to enormous proportions, as large as my hand to be exact. What is one  to do with all of this gigantic spinach? Well, I harvested it all into a large paper bag and shoved and shoved it full until no more could fit. Then it was time to process the booty. Rinse, take off the stems, second rinse, steam for five minutes, blanche, squeeze out the extra water and bag for the freezer. It sounds easy, until you realize that your first 3 batches have taken almost an hour to complete and you have barely made a dent in the harvest. Is it possible that it is multiplying in the dark recesses of the bag? I have to take a break, so the whole thing goes into the fridge. In the meantime, anyone who stops by, leaves with a bag of spinach. After sending off our second bag, it hits me. Spinach Ricotta Pie.

Before I get ahead of myself, one of my genius girlfriends came up with the concept of a blog group. Every two months, we choose a cookbook to explore and we blog about it. What recipes were wonderful? Which recipes were wonderful after we tweaked them? How did we tweak them?

At the end, we will gather with a potluck to share the best of our best from the cookbook.  Our blogsite is http://cookbookclubsanjuan.blogspot.com/.

I was given the honor of choosing our very first book. This is a tremendous amount of pressure to start this process, but given the bounty we will see from our gardens in the upcoming months, I had to choose the "Moosewood Cookbook" by Mollie Katzen. I just love it and I am looking forward to exploring the book beyond the Spinach Ricotta Pie (click here for a link to Mollie's website with the recipe). Now that isn't the only recipe I have tried, but in the two years that I have owned this cookbook, it is the recipe I make over and over and over again. It's addictive.

So now, with my large quantities of spinach I will make Spinach Ricotta Pie. I will also turn over my garden to more spinach seeds to grow more delicious spinach for salads and other dishes, but I am on a mission now to make sure I have at least 20 bags of frozen spinach for the winter to insure I can make Mollie's pie.

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