spinach – The Kitchen Illiterate

Not-So-Meaty Meatloaf

Toward the end of March I started realizing that I was eating a lot of sweets. And french fries. And more pizza than usual. My carefully developed healthy habits had taken a nosedive, and I was feeling it. I decided to declare April Health Month. My intention wasn’t to embark on a month of strictness and deprivation, but to remind myself how much better I feel when I’m eating more vegetables, and being thoughtful and conscientious about the amount of sugar, meat, and fried things I’m putting in my body. I re-read Mark Bittman’s Food Matters, and I started planning healthy meals.
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Greek Frittata

Frittatas are like the easier version of quiche. Just as much eggy goodness, no need to roll out pie dough. They make for a simple, quick dinner, and are perfect paired with a light green salad. You might be more familiar with the frittata’s role at the brunch table: I assure you, it plays well at any meal. What makes this such a stellar workhorse? You can do anything with a frittata. You can throw in whatever bits and pieces you have floating around in your refrigerator and chances are it will be delicious. Versatility is the name of the game.
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An Even Better Chicken Florentine

Over three years ago, I made Chicken Florentine for the first time, and ever since then, it’s been the most frequently viewed recipe on this site. By a landslide. The people, they love Chicken Florentine. But I’ve never been entirely happy with that recipe. And let’s not even talk about the photographs in the post; they make me cringe. In the years since, I’ve made Chicken Florentine a handful of times again, and I’ve tweaked the recipe here and there each time. I just knew it could be even better, and I was right. My friends, I think I finally have my best Chicken Florentine recipe, and I knew I had to share it with all of you.
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Orzo and Bean Salad with Sweet Potatoes

One thing that is really hard for me about life in Walla Walla is the lack of a Trader Joe’s within a 200 mile radius. Whenever I travel to Portland, or even California, I stock up and drag all my TJ’s loot back home with me. I even shipped a box of kitchen goodies home from San Diego this winter, and have been happily enjoying my Candy Cane Jo Jo’s since then. One thing I always pick up is a can or two of their Marinated Salad Beans. These beans are awesome for a quick weeknight dinner, and this salad is one of my new favorites. In fact, I love it so much that now that I’m out of Trader Joe’s Marinated Salad Beans, I’ve been working on making the same vinaigrette to marinate my own salad beans. I’ve also found a few other brands that are more widely carried, and they make a decent substitute, although I don’t think they’re quite as good.
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Spicy Citrus Shrimp and Spinach

I don’t use a lot of citrus in the kitchen, though I have been eating clementines nearly every day this winter. I don’t actually use a lot of fruit in my cooking at all. Fruit is sweet and therefore my savory-loving self has a hard time intuitively understanding how it fits into dinner. But when I saw this recipe for Grilled Shrimp with Citrus-Sambal-Oelek dressing in April’s Food & Wine, I was intrigued. The idea of something bright and spicy is very appealing this time of year, when summer taunts at every turn. What I ended up with was slightly different from the original recipe, based on what I had in the kitchen, but holy moly, it was so good I think I’m going to try introducing citrus to my pots and pans more often.
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Spicy Shrimp with Buckwheat Soba Noodles

It’s always amusing for me to go back to the early archives of this site and realize how little I knew about cooking. And I posted everything, no matter how lackluster the final product. A lot of these early culinary endeavors, despite being executed poorly, do hold some promise, and I’ve been having fun re-creating them and trying to improve where I went wrong back in the day. One of these improvements turned out so much better, and was so easy, that I suspect I’ll be making it more often: The Spicy Shrimp and Red Onion Pasta of 2007 became the Spicy Shrimp with Buckwheat Soba Noodles you see here, and they were much more palatable this time around. It was all about the balance of ingredients, and using the right kind of noodles.
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Sweet Potato and Spinach Gratin

I’ll be honest, I had little niggling voices of doubt in the back of my mind as I started putting this dinner together. It sounds like a dubious combination: Sweet potatoes, spinach, garlic, and cheddar cheese? For reals? Well, I’m here to tell you, my friends, to allay your fears of a weird dinner. This is excellent! The flavors balance each other very nicely, and it is a wonderful cold weather comfort food dinner: warm and cheesy, but with the added kick of nutritiousness that sweet potatoes and spinach bring to the table: beta carotene, vitamin C, iron, vitamin K, the list goes on and on. I love it when I get my indulgence and my health boost in one place.

You might think that the cheese cancels out the benefits of the vegetables, but let me tell you, that is simply not true. Some vitamins are fat-soluble, meaning they aren’t absorbed in the body without a complementary dose of tasty, tasty, fat. So don’t skimp on the cheese. It’s good for you!
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Spinach and Clementine Salad

So far, February has been a little hectic. I’ve been traveling a lot for work (who knew being a librarian would involve so many hotel rooms?), and luckily I’ve been able to combine that work travel with visits to friends and family. I got to spend a week in the Bay Area, and even got to go to Santa Cruz for a quick day trip, a place which still has the ability to make me blissfully happy, even though they are doing massive construction on my old dorm. Oh nostalgia, you are a powerful beast.

Of course, all this traveling has involved a lot of restaurant meals, and I don’t complain about that. But I do miss my kitchen when I’m away, and frankly, when I return I’m not usually in the mood to be wildly experimental with my food. No, I’m a homebody at heart, and being away makes me long for familiar dinners, like my very favorite chicken enchiladas. But the days of heavy restaurant food also make me crave light, fresh salads, and this winter-friendly spinach and citrus salad absolutely does not disappoint.
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Spinach Potato Mash

I have to say, I don’t know if there’s anything I like so much as a big bowl of mashed potatoes for dinner, especially in February, when it’s cold and damp and winter is still a long way from being over. Before I knew the first thing about cooking, or sound nutrition, for that matter, I would frequently mix up a pot of fake, dehydrated mashed potato flakes and happily enjoy my beige dinner. And my parents always knew to quadruple the mashed potato recipe at Thanksgiving if they wanted any hope of leftovers.

I do still love mashed potatoes, but have since figured out that if I want to eat them for dinner, it would be wise to find some way to make them a more complete (and healthy) meal. Not to knock the humble potato. Potatoes have a reputation for being nutritionally suspect, but one potato packs a healthy wallop of vitamin C, potassium, vitamin B6, and fiber, not to mention a ton of important, good energy for the proper functioning of the body. Potatoes are most certainly our friends.
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Sweet Potato and Sausage Soup

Yes, my friends, it is soup season again. I adore soup season, as you can probably tell from a quick glance through the archives of this site. Soup recipes abound. Soup is one of the easiest things to cook, and to experiment with—you can make delicious soup of of nearly anything. Most of the soup I make is vegetarian, if not vegan, so this particular soup is a bit different for me. I originally flagged it in the October 2007 issue of Bon Appetit, but just got around to make it a few weeks ago, on a chilly October day, when Mr. X was visiting. I figured he would appreciate a hearty, flavorful soup made with chorizo. And he did.
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