Thursday, May 8, 2008

Sauteed Spinach with Garlic Confit

Most kids don't like spinach. It, for some reason, is the stereotypical sound of fear for everyone under the age of 12 at the dinner table. I was included in this group, except for my membership lasted until about the age of 25. I've recently changed my tune a little bit, and I now enjoy spinach on occasion. This would be one of those occasions.

I made this to go with the trout from last week, and it was perfect in multiple ways. It's a single pan dish, which accompanied the three pan trout dish on my four burner stove. It needs almost no attention, and you can pretty much do it at the last minutes. That, and the prep is really easy (If you happen to have garlic confit laying around. You probably don't, but I did and it was starting to go bad). Anyway, the only other ingredients are butter, shallots, and spinach. Easy, right? I know!

I melted the butter in a sauce pan. Because I'm shameless, here's the same picture that I used in the trout post so that you can see the extra exciting melting butter. That's it in on the back burner:

There's probably a stick of butter on those two burners. It was not necessarily a healthy night. Once the butter was melted, the shallots went in for a minute, and then the garlic confit, some salt, and pepper. As much spinach as you can fit in your pan goes into the butter mixture, and you slowly add more and more as it wilts until it's all in there. I turned the spinach occasionally to ensure an even buttery coating throughout, and everything was done in just minutes. Now there's no way to take a glamorous looking picture of wilted spinach coated with butter, but here's my attempt:

This was probably the best spinach I've ever had. It was buttery, garlickly, and I guess spinachy. The spell checker had to work extra hard on that last sentence. I would make this again pretty much any time I want to. I assume it the basic butter, garlic, greens combo would work without regard to your choice of green, but do that at your own risk. Or be safe and use spinach, because that's delicious.

1 comment:

Kevin said...

Hi,
I've just discovered your blog and love it. I'm a great fan of cooking every recipe in book X blogs. I'm doing every recipe in The Gourmet Cookbook at www.gourmetproject.ca. I'll be following along, and adding you to my blogroll, good luck!