Spinach

Before I got married, my mother asked me, ‘Are you sure you could stand being married to someone who doesn’t like mushrooms or sweetcorn?’

The answer is emphatically yes.  Being married to someone who is intelligent, funny, caring, utterly lovable, and apparently equally delighted to be married to me, and who shares my urge to sing ‘Ill Wind’ by Michael Flanders when a Mozart horn concerto comes on the radio, is more than I had ever hoped for.  It is a small price to pay that I share my meals with someone who is deeply reluctant to eat any of the following:

·                     Most vegetables other than potatoes, roots (such as carrots and parsnips), onions, leafy green vegetables, beans, and occasionally peas.  (Fortunately, this rule doesn’t apply in Chinese restaurants, where most things are given the benefit of the doubt, except sweetcorn and mushrooms.)

·                     Any fruits except apples, pears, bananas, and possibly strawberries when fully-ripened, locally grown ones are available in summer.

·                     Dried fruits or any cake, scone etc. containing them.

·                     Any fruits that pretend to be vegetables, e.g. tomatoes, courgettes, avocadoes, squashes.  It turns out that cooked chopped or puréed tomatoes, on pizza or in pasta sauces or casseroles, are permissible, as are small quantities of olives, capers, and possibly a few pieces of peppers, but a goulash containing two peppers in a four-portion quantity is definitely too much.

·                     Any fruit juice except apple or orange juice (as long as it isn’t a freshly-squeezed variety that tastes too much like oranges).

·                     Any vegetables that pretend to be fruit.  (I think rhubarb is the only example of this.)

·                     Salad dressing, or any salad vegetables other than leaves, raw carrot, and onions.

·                     Rice (except fried rice at a Chinese restaurant, but even then we’re more likely to order noodles).

·                     Any hot, spicy dishes such as chilli or curry.  (This means that my goulash is now much less spooky, with only a moderate amount of paprika, and my chicken puttanesca is positively virginal – the chicken in ground black pepper can stay, provided the chilli peppers in the sauce don’t.) 

In fairness, of the foods my husband does like, he is willing to try them in inventive combinations; for example, the day after a Christmas dinner with smoked salmon hors d’oeuvres, he made a Boxing Day snack of baked beans and smoked salmon on toast, and it was delicious.  He is also the only person I know who, if given Marmite-flavoured chocolate for Christmas, is open-minded enough to taste it, and to concede that, if it had been good-quality dark chocolate instead of cheap milk chocolate, it might actually have worked.

At the same time, he is the person who helped me to appreciate nutritious, wholesome traditional foods that I hadn’t even thought of trying since childhood, such as liver and kidneys.  I was also surprised to learn that one of the fairly short list of vegetables he does like is spinach. 

I’m all in favour of this – after all, spinach is high in vitamins and minerals, if not quite as phenomenally iron-rich as Popeye believed (it gained an exaggerated reputation after researchers placed a decimal point in the wrong place).  Amongst other things, it is high in potassium (which can lower blood pressure), beta carotene (which can reduce the risk of asthma), iron, calcium, magnesium, and vitamins A, C, and K, and loads of fibre.  It may even help prevent diabetes and deteriorating eyesight.

However, fresh spinach quickly goes mushy, and the frozen sort isn’t exactly appetising (let alone the tinned gloop that Popeye eats).  So, for the last couple of years, I have grown it in our garden.

This is another advantage to spinach: it is probably the easiest vegetable for an inexperienced and lazy gardener like me to grow.  You can sow the seeds outdoors, in the tub or bed where you want them to grow, any time from February to September.  This site advises covering with cloches or fleece if you sow them early, but I planted mine in February this year, ignored them while they were covered with snow in March, and got a magnificent crop.  As long as they’re well watered and their soil has plenty of compost, they seem to do fine.

So, when you’ve got the bumper crop and need to use it up before it bolts, what do you do with it?  Personally, I think the raw baby leaves are much more interesting than lettuce as a salad vegetable, in sandwiches, or accompanying a pasta dish or meat in a sauce that doesn’t seem quite right with cooked vegetables.  The leaves regrow several times after being picked, as long as you don’t take too many leaves from any one plant at once and kill the plant.

Apart from that, two dishes we tend to use when we’ve got a glut of spinach we need to use up are Chickpea, Spinach and Chorizo Stew and Spinach, Cottage Cheese and Parmesan Flan.  The flan recipe is this, seasoned with nutmeg.  The pastry is nice made with wholemeal flour.  I paint the pastry case with beaten egg and put it into the oven to bake, before pouring in the mixture.  It goes well with baked beans.

The Chickpea, Spinach and Chorizo Stew recipe I normally use is similar to this or this but with paprika instead of Nigella’s chilli or Food and Wine’s bay-leaf and rosemary, and with only about 80g of chorizo for four servings.  Most of the protein comes from the pulses (which I try to vary by combining, say, one tin of chickpeas and one tin of kidney beans), and so the smoked chorizo, along with the paprika, garlic and onions, is there to flavour it. 

This is a good meal for people who don’t want to go vegetarian, but do want to cut down on meat for health or environmental reasons.  It’s good with jacket potatoes – and if you add a side-dish of carrots, you’ll probably be consuming your five a day in one meal.