The Dinner Files

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I really do just want a salad for dinner. The boys ate more of the chickpea and spinach curry — Ernest ate his with rice, my dashing husband preferred it with toasted walnut bread — while I used the just-picked spinach from our farm box to make this slightly wilted spinach salad. I found a nub of buttermilk blue cheese in the cheese drawer. It was covered with a nice thick carpet of fussy gray which I carved away to reveal a bit of perfectly edible and tasty cheese. I’m not going to die, am I? Or, more precisely, that cheese isn’t going to kill me, is it?

Wilted spinach salad when you have no bacon

Thoroughly pick over, wash and dry a bunch of spinach leaves. I like to then cut them into strips for easier eating down the road — plus it helps me fit more leaves in the bowl.

Heat 3 Tbsp. olive oil in a small frying pan over medium-high heat or, if you’re feeling kicky and don’t want dinner to be too terribly healthy and feel like a treat and happen to have some duck fat in the fridge, melt 3 Tbsp. of that instead.

Cook a clove of garlic or, in this case, three chopped up green garlics in the oil, add salt and cook until the garlic is soft. Add 1 Tbsp. sherry or balsamic vinegar. Swirl to combine everything and pour it over the salad. Quickly toss salad and then put a plate or pot lid over the bowl to let the leaves wilt a bit more. Let it sit a few minutes while you toast some bread or chop some nuts to add to it or do a little dance in the privacy of your kitchen. Add plenty of freshly ground black pepper, some crumbled blue cheese, and a handful or so of chopped walnuts or pine nut if you’re so inclined.

I had some random stuff in the fridge and we need to pick up the farm box today, so I wanted to use as much from the veggie drawer as possible last night. We enjoyed this frightfully nutritious curry/stew concoction over… yep, rice. Project Eat That Rice continues….

No, we don’t have a cat. My dashing husband is really quite remarkably allergic to cats. I’ve checked. Many moons ago I once neglected to tell him the house to which we had been invited to eat dinner was home to a cat. I had our hosts hide the cat, super-duper clean the house, and kept my fingers crossed. It’s the best he’s ever done – it took over an hour for his eyes to turn red and his nose to run and for him to start wondering aloud if he was coming down with something. Of course I felt horrible and have met the subsequent challenges of being paired with someone so allergic to cats* with the resolve of the British during the Blitz. Or perhaps I exaggerate.

The cat that is away, ironically enough, is my dashing husband. A quick business trip to the southland means I got to put cream in the pasta last night and boy oh boy did Ernest and I enjoy that! My dashing husband, as regular readers know, has certain dietary requirements and ideas and I try to humor him (especially since, it ends up, he really does seem to feel better when he follows them).

Instead of our regular pasta with greens that is such a standard around here I’ve stopped posting about it for fear of 1) boring you and 2) having a record of how often we eat it and being hauled away by the culinary police in case they exist, we had creamy pasta with greens – and I even baked it casserole-style for some crispy brownness on top.

It’s easy, fast, creates limited dirty dishes if you cook the “sauce” in the pot after you drain the pasta, and you can even make it ahead and then bake it if that’s how you roll (I’m talking to you, Mom!). Some people might want quite a bit more cheese in it that I used. Hell, I wanted quite a bit more cheese in it if there were no such thing as calories or saturated fat. Do as the spirit moves you, is all I can say. I can also say that this particular combination — with the cream to soften the rough edges — would be pretty darn tasty with a whole grain pasta for all of you out there with New Year’s Resolutions you’re still trying to follow.

* They are legion, now that you ask. We can’t stay with people who have a cat, which has proved most inconvenient more than once. Cannot dine at the homes of people with cats, which has put a damper on a many otherwise enticing invitations. And, of course, I cannot get a cat. I’m not sure I want one, but I can’t have one so I can flirt with the idea every now and again and feel deprived.

New moms need calcium, and iron, and protein, and a bit of fat, and some carbs to keep ‘em going. My absolute favorite thing to eat those first few weeks after Ernie was born was an insanely rich mac-n-cheese a friend made for me, with a side of scrambled eggs. That was my breakfast for a full week, if memory serves correctly.

Last night we ate a spinach lasagna that was constructed from the leftover elements of the spinach lasagnas I made for two friends who are new moms. When did they have these babies, you ask? Well, a few months ago and I just lamed out and never brought either of them food. Midwestern grandmothers are spinning in their graves, and after I post this I fully expect a disappointed phone call from my mother. I don’t know what happened. But the important thing for you, my dear dear internets, is that I finally did make this lasagna and now you can too.

Spinach lasagna holds a special place in my family. It is, perhaps, my mom’s signature dish. We all love it. My sister-in-law requests it for her birthday dinner. And what have I done? I’ve changed it. Between my fancy-pants ideas about food and my half Italian-American husband, I’ve sucked the Midwest right out of this dish. (How it actually happened is: I was living in Paris, called my mom for the recipe, and it was easier to find the more Italian ingredients like ricotta and mozzarella than the more American ingredients like cottage cheese and monterey jack (!), and a revised dish was born.) For those of you who know and love my mom’s spinach lasagna, you’ll have to call her for that recipe. For the rest of us, this will have to suffice.

Spinach Lasagna

Butter an 8×8 baking pan and preheat the oven to 375 if you plan on just making, cooking, and eating the lasagna. Why you would do that, I’m not sure since this puppy can sit for a day or two in the fridge and freezes beautifully…. On that same note, feel free to double this and make two or bake it up in a 9×13 or 10×15–it is an endlessly flexible dish (the one pictured above is a skimpy version baked in a smaller dish and with only two layers of noodles, yet was still delic).

Boil 8 oz. lasagna noodles is salty water until tender. Drain and lay out on clean towels until you’re ready to build the lasagna.

So, meanwhile melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a large frying pan. Cook 1 fairly finely chopped onion and 1/2 teaspoon salt until the onion is very soft an sort of pasty looking. Add 20 oz. spinach (frozen actually works just dandy, just squeeze the water out of it first; if using fresh, chop it up a bit first) and cook over high heat, stirring frequently, until most of the liquid evaporates. Set aside.

In a large bowl beat 2 eggs then stir in 1 lb. ricotta and 1 lb. grated fresh mozzarella. Add about 1 cup freshly grated parmesan and plenty of freshly ground black pepper. A grating or two of nutmeg is in no way inappropriate at this juncture, but it is fully optional. Stir in spinach. If you’re like me and live on the edge, taste it (salmonella be damned!–actually I know where my eggs come from and feel pretty confident that they’re clean) and add salt if you like.

Layer noodles, a bit more than 1/3 cheese mixture, noodles, again a bit more than 1/3 cheese mixture, noodles, a fair bit less that 1/3 cheese mixture, and top with some grated parm. I like to layer in the noodles so the bottom layer extends up the sides and I can fold them over the top at the end creating a crunchy, chewy noodle-crust around the whole thing. Cover with foil, bake 20 minutes, uncover and bake until hot and bubbling and browning, about another 20 minutes.

Prepare for tales of a dream house guest. My best friend from high school is in town for an extra-long weekend. Guess what she likes to do when she visits? Projects. There is no one better to help me clean out a closet–she makes me try stuff on and gives deeply honest assessments (from “could you look cuter?” to “who are you” to “what were you thinking” to a burst of dismayed laughter). Past visits have included such highlights as digging up a dead tree in the yard, painting the study, assembling furniture of all sorts. We’re going to spend the weekend pulling up carpeting and I can’t wait!

In exchange for hard labor, I cook for her. She does not cook for herself. She is a cereal-for-breakfastdinner kind of gal. Once when I was visiting her, she came home from work, looked around her kitchen, decided there wasn’t anything to eat and proceeded to try and eat cold black beans out of the can. I confiscated the can and made her some huevos rancheros.

Last night I wowed her with this spinach, pecorino, pistachio pasta my family has fallen for this spring, adding a fair number of beet greens to the spinach portion. (I’ll stop making this when we run out of pistachios, I promise!)

She also tasted strawberries straight out of the farm box and declared that fruit that good just might make her move to California.

I’m crossing my fingers.

We had it again, this time with green garlic from our “farm box.” Even better. It’s a new family favorite, although, truth be told, Ernie preferred the long-stemmed strawberries that came in the same box: “Mama, look! I made up a game! You spin the strawberry and take a bite! Look at all my bites!”

Messy, but at least he’s eating his fruits and vegetables.

Not much in the cupboard, no one wanted to brave the throngs at the store on a Saturday evening. So Spinach, Pistachio, Pecorino Pasta! was born.

Boil fusilli in salted water. After cooking for a few minutes, remove and reserve a cup of the cooking liquid. Drain pasta a bit before it’s done. Set aside. In the same pot, sauté 3 oil-cured anchovies in some olive oil, as they sizzle, add a few shakes of red pepper flakes (were we not out of garlic, I would add a few sliced cloves of that as well). Add as much thoroughly washed spinach as you have lying about (you could even add a handful of beet leaves, as I did) and stir until they look defeated.

Add the drained pasta and the reserved pasta water. Cover and cook until liquid is absorbed and pasta is tender. Stir in 1 cup grated fresh pecorino until it melts and everything looks just a bit cheesy. Add about 1/2 cup chopped pistachios. Serve topped with grated aged pecorino