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It’s a little hard to enjoy hot soup right now where I live, but at least this one didn’t take long to make. Spinach not only cooks down greatly, it does this very quickly. One second it’s crowding out everything else in the pot, the next it’s just a few green flecks among it. All good news for me, because not only did I have to invent a spinach recipe this week, I’m also one of those strange people who actually like spinach, and I prefer it cooked to raw.
Not that I dislike it raw. In fact, what I did when I was washing the spinach for this soup was save the small number of perfect, untorn leaves for a salad tomorrow. The torn-up ones, which taste just as good, got cut into strips. By the way, the quickest way to do that is to roll up five or six or more leaves together and cut the bundle into narrow strips. The smaller size makes the cooking even faster.
If you make this a little thicker, you can use it as a pasta sauce. Add cooked mushrooms and you can call it Florentine sauce. If you really prefer tomato sauce, try putting strips of spinach in that — it does cook down so much people may not even notice it, or they may think it’s oregano.
How to Cook and Eat in Chinese has an interesting recipe I’ve never tried: You cook the spinach, then cool it and make it into a salad with dried shrimp. I’ve also seen a recipe for a spinach and grapefruit salad with soy sauce. Maybe I’ll try it tomorrow — we’ve still got those few nice looking spinach leaves.
- 4 cups fresh spinach, washed and cut in strips
- 2 cups milk
- ¼ cup blending flour
- 3 tablespoons Parmesan cheese
- Heat the milk over medium heat in a medium pot (you’ll need the extra space).
- Bring to the point where it’s just bubbling
- Slowly add the spinach.
- Stir carefully until the spinach cooks down. Once this starts, it takes only a couple of minutes.
- When it looks more like milk with a little spinach in it than spinach with a little milk, whisk a small amount into the flour in a small bowl.
- When the flour mixture is smooth, whisk it into the soup in the pot.
- Add the Parmesan cheese and stir.
- Salt to taste.
