Cleaning Spinach

One of the primary reasons that I asked for permission to live in the Stone Cottage was the chance to have my own kitchen. I have been cooking since I lived off campus in college; and it has become a big part of my life. In the past, though, I have always had to scramble to find somewhere to cook. I could use the kitchen in the abbey, but only after the staff had left. Generally, that meant a few hours in the evening. On other occasions, I would cook in the houses of friends, which was always fun, but also a bit limiting. I longed to have access to a kitchen all the time. Now my dream has finally come true and I am taking full advantage of the opportunity.

I love cooking for friends. Having the cottage finally makes it possible for me to entertain and I have recently begun doing that. Earlier this week, I had friends over whom for dinner. The husband has some dietary quirks that make menu planning a challenge. He doesn’t eat meat, which is not an issue. I have plenty of non-meat recipes in my repertoire. However, he also doesn’t eat onions or garlic, which is a major hurdle. After thinking about it for a while, I decided that gnocchi might be a possibility for the first course. I could serve them with a gorgonzola sauce, which would not involve either onions or garlic. I need a gnocchi refresher though.

Two years ago, I downloaded an online course on how to make gnocchi. So, I sat down one night to review the lessons. The first lesson was basic potato gnocchi. After watching the video, I was pretty much decided that this would work. But then, the second lesson came along. It was about how to make spinach and ricotta “gnudi”, a kind of dumpling. Hmmm, I thought. They would allow me to practice what I learned at my recent cheese making class. I could make my own ricotta! That was it. I was going to give the “gnudi” a try. Two nights before the dinner, I made the ricotta. I was amazed at how easy and delicious it was. Now I had to try to find the right spinach. All of the supermarkets in the area had baby spinach for salads, but none had leaf spinach. I was almost ready to switch back to gnocchi when I found the right spinach. I was now ready to begin making my “gnudi”.

Homemade ricotta

When I have company for dinner, I try to do as much in advance as I can. I wasn’t sure that I could make the gnudi much in advance. They just didn’t seem like a product that would keep. I decided to re-watch the video to see if the instructor said anything about this.  While watching, I saw something that I hadn’t really noticed any of the other times. It was where she explained how to clean, or more precisely, de-stem the spinach. I knew about having to wash spinach thoroughly to remove any grit, but I had never seen anyone remove the stems. She folded each leaf in half, with the backside up. She then pinched the leaf together under the stem and pulled upwards, removing the stem and leaving the leaves intact. “Brilliant”, I thought. That was the good news. The bad news was that there didn’t seem to be any way to make the gnudi much in advance. That meant more work on the day of the dinner. It also meant I needed a back-up plan that I could pull off quickly, in case something didn’t work.

Spinach de-stemmed

The next day I found myself at the sink with a pile of spinach. I needed to see if I could replicate what the instructor did. The first few tries were not so successful. But, then, I seemed to get the hang of it and I was de-stemming spinach at a good clip. I thought to myself, “How long have people been cleaning spinach this way?” “Probably for centuries”, I answered myself. Then I thought back to the video. The instructor, Gerri, has a New York (Brooklyn?) accent thick enough to cut with a meat cleaver. She also runs a cooking program in Umbria. “I bet she learned how to do that in Italy.” I thought. I could just see her with some nonna who showed her how to do this. Now, here I was, in the kitchen of my little stone cottage in suburban New Jersey de-stemming spinach in just the same way. I marveled at the persistence of some of these practices. It also made me think about how much the way Americans think about food and how food preparation has changed. But more about that at another time . . .

By the way, in case you were wondering, the gnudi turned out great.