What To Do With All That Spinach?

We have fresh spinach coming in right now.  The Galilee Spinach seed that I saved had bad germination, but the old standby variety that we like (Monstrueux De Viroflay) is really producing.  The spinach that Popeye would eat from a can cannot be compared to this stuff.  Popeye would never eat canned spinach again once he tried this variety.  Anyhow, for the recipe we'll be cooking up today, we needed 2 cups of spinach packed tightly.

We're cooking up some Pasta with tomatoes, spinach and ricotta.  We have some bowtie pasta cooking on the back burner.  Here we have the spinach cut up with 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil, 1 lb cocktail tomatoes and salt and pepper all sautéing in a pan.

The spinach is added last and is sautéed lightly.

1/3 cup of basil is added and then all of it is poured atop the cooked and drained bowtie pasta.

I don't know if you remember, but a couple of months ago, we made several batches of mozzarella cheese from several gallons of LuLu's milk.  When you make mozzarella, you get ricotta cheese as sort of a by product.  We had some of it frozen, so we thawed it out and added it to the pot.

To the top of that we added 1/2 cup of freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

This is all stirred together and it's now ready to serve!

Delicious!  Creamy!  It's a great way to use some of the spinach that's coming in.  The next time we make it, we'll double the amount of spinach to 4 cups packed and also add more fresh basil and some minced garlic.  With all the spinach, and cooler weather coming in this week, we were talking about also making a Cream of Spinach soup.  Ravioli stuffed with spinach might be on the agenda as well.

Popeye Would be Proud!

We plant two different types of spinach in the garden - Galilee Spinach (from Israel!) and Monstrueux De Viroflay Spinach (from France).  The Galilee Spinach has already bolted and I'm waiting for the seeds to dry so that I can plant again this fall.  The French Spinach is still producing and producing well, but with several days approaching 80 degrees, it won't be long until it bolts as well.

With that in mind, I picked a big colander full of the leaves and packed them down.  I wanted to get all the leaves I could before bolting.  I'll try to get another picking off of it, but we'll see how that goes.  The leaves are dark green and healthy.  There is no pest damage to speak of on the leaves.

Now, we've been eating fresh spinach salads for a while now, and we enjoy it that way.  We also make a Creamed Spinach side dish that is a copycat of Ruth's Chris Steak House recipe.  We'll make that next.  Tricia wanted to try a spinach quiche with a twist.  The crust is made of sweet potato.  Turns out we still have some sweet potatoes that we harvested over the fall.  They've stored well.  Tricia sliced and baked the sweet potato, lined the pie dish, poured the spinach and egg and topped with cheese and baked.  Voila!

Looks rich and delicious!

And as it turned out, it was.  Now, I'll admit, I would rather a regular crust, but I love sweet potatoes, too.  I would think vegetarians would like this.  I'm definitely NOT a vegetarian, but it was good.

The final thing we did with our 'spinach-fest' was a good ol' Cream of Spinach soup.  Tricia had just made some fresh chicken broth from one of our chickens and that was just what we needed for this dish.  Creamy, spinach-y, and it was kinda cool last night so the soup hit the spot.

Popeye the sailor man would be digging our meals this week!