How To Make Your Kids Like Spinach

Maybe it’s just me, but although veggies are increasingly hard to come by in this area, one vegetable lingers, reluctantly available: spinach. And I don’t know why. Spinach is goddamn amazing. It’s a nutritional powerhouse, for one. For two, it tastes amazing. No, it may not have the COLON LOCOMOTIVE powers of, say, kale, it’s still green and healthy and all that happy shit.

But, for some reason, people aren’t buying it. Again, around here. Maybe where you are, everybody’s Popeye looking for muscles, but here, they’re leaving that and Brussels sprouts on the shelf. Lockdown still won’t push them to the fringes of the produce aisle, I guess?

(Here’s my Brussels sprouts recipe, before you ask.)

Maybe it’s because The Kids Today are like The Kids Of Yesteryear and just won’t eat spinach. (And only now is it occurring to me that Popeye was some kind of vegetable propaganda. Same way an apple a day keeps the doctor away, and carrots “help” your “eyesight” and other such vegetable legends.) I sure didn’t eat spinach when I was a kid, are you nuts? No, no, I had a discerning palate. It was Spaghetti-Os or nothing, you vulgarian. Toss a couple hot dogs in there? C’est magnifique.

More seriously, I’ve come to believe that the parents of yesteryear — like, let’s say of the 80s — really didn’t get how to cook vegetables all the time. And a lot of veggies available were in cans? It wasn’t a good time for vegetables, no wonder we were all sick and weak. Mushy asparagus. Mushrooms that tastes less like graceful wood ear and more like human baby ears. Steam it, boil it, meh. So, entirely possible spinach just wasn’t winning any awards back then. But we’ve grown smarter when it comes to cooking vegetables and I have a super-hella-stupid-easy spinach dish that will —

Wait, what are you looking at?

Hello? Eyes down here.

Ah. Ah. Yeah, I get it, the photo at the top of the post contains no spinach. It’s tomatoes and okra and potatoes and tomatillo husks and I’m sorry, I don’t have any spinach photos. Settle down. It’s fine.

AS I WAS SAYING

This is a spinach dish my kid doesn’t just eat, but that he eats with delight.

Now, my kid is also a little weird. He likes veggies a whole lot. He likes sushi. For his birthday, he asks for me to make him Brussels sprouts. So, do recognize his tastes are skewed for a kid, but I also like to believe, perhaps mistakenly, it’s because I know how to make food tasty.

And this spinach? Is tasty.

Here’s what you do.

Skillet. Stainless steel for me.

Bit of olive oil or butter, depending on your predilections for particular FOOD LUBES.

Then, some chopped garlic. Again, your tastes matter here. Thinly sliced garlic is nice. Minced is fine. Maybe a shallot instead, who cares. Food is customizable, it’s a menu of possibility and delight. Honestly, if all you have is garlic powder in These Perilous Quarantimes, that’s fine, too, just don’t add it now, add it later. Just note that the bigger the chonks of garlic, the milder the garlic taste will be, because it’s got less cuts to the, I dunno, GARLICKIAN MICROSTRUCTURE and reduced GARLIC SQUARE FOOTAGE or something. Hashtag science. Hashtag shut up.

Get the garlic in the oil or butter.

Cook until fragrant, not until burned.

Then, fill the skillet with spinach.

Here the question is, fresh or frozen? Yes. Whatever. Either. Frozen is fine, and remember, frozen vegetables tend to be plunged into suspended animation at the peak of their freshness. I like the Woodstock brand, because it comes out looking like a batch of cryo-nuggs of sci-fi weed, and it has a delicate tea-leaf taste to it. Shit, maybe I’ve just been cooking tea leaves and weed? That might explain a lot about me. It’s fine. Point is, fresh or frozen.

And it can also be Swiss chard. Or other greens of your choosing.

This application is easy and applies to every cooking green I’ve tried it with.

So.

Heat on medium. Spinach in the pan.

Salt and pepper go onto it.

Cook it down until the leaves are reduced. If fresh, you’ll start with this massive APPLE CART of spinach, and end up with four thimbles, as all that water comes out and the leaves wilt. And in that case you can keep adding spinach to freshen it up. It’s pretty resilient long as you don’t burn it.

Add in couple splashes of chicken broth, just enough to coat the bottom of the pan.

A pinch of Italian seasoning or Herbs de Provence.

(That’s French for Herbert, of Provence.)

Cook, cook, cook.

Ten minutes, fifteen, I dunno. Like I said, spinach is resilient. A good food for these tough times. Spinach doesn’t give a fuck. It has green goodness and it doesn’t care if you don’t like it.

Then when it’s cooked down pretty good and has started to lose its emerald green in favor of a Bob Ross-painted pine-tree, you want to add first a splash of sherry vinegar. How much is a splash? I dunno. A splash. You can add more if you need to so like, think a tablespoon or two.

Then, cook a bit, just a minute or two to incorporate.

Final bit, add in a couple splashes of heavy cream. Twice the amount of the vinegar, let’s say.

Mix-a-mix-a-mix.

There. That’s it. Season again after tasting if need be.

It’s good. Your kids will like it. You will like it, too. Unless you’re one of those weird adults who won’t eat vegetables. Christ in a crab trap, eat your vegetables, you scurvy-sickened ricket-monsters.

All right, that’s it. Go eat some spinach. And buy my books or I die.