It never would have occurred to me to sprinkle Nutmeg on spinach, but I thought that could be interesting, so why not try it. Plus, we're diving into holiday eating season, and nutmeg always reminds me of the holidays. And then I got goofy and thought, Spinach (strong) + Nutmeg (sweet) = Popeye + Olive Oyl (his sweetie). Ok, that's my vivid imagination making corny associations.
I found this Spinach With Nutmeg and Lemon recipe on Martha Stewart and tweaked it some because I can never make a recipe exactly as stated. It's the rule breaker in me :) I opted out of the lemon because I don't care for tart on Spinach, and I put sauteed garlic in everything so I was curious what garlic and nutmeg would taste like together. Could be awesome or incredibly yuck.
What I like about this recipe too is that it's easy and super fast. In fact, it's almost Superman fast because wilting spinach takes like seconds.
Ingredients (for 2 servings):
- 1 6oz. pre-packaged bag of fresh Spinach. I get the equivalent amount of fresh spinach from the bulk bin at Whole Foods.
- 3 garlic cloves cut into slivers
- 1/8 tsp nutmeg, ground or grated
- Sea salt & Black pepper to taste
- 1 tbsp Olive Oil (versus Olive Oyl, Popeye's sweetie. Ok, goofy me :)
Let's Get Cookin':
- Heat the olive oil in a pan on medium. If the pan is too hot, like on high, the spinach will disintegrate immediately. It's not pretty. We want to wilt the spinach not singe it.
- Saute the garlic until it looks soft.
- Toss in the fresh spinach and add the nutmeg and salt & pepper.
- Mix around the spinach with the garlic until the Spinach looks almost wilty. Now, this step literally will take seconds because spinach starts wilting the second it hits heat on a pan. In fact, you want to take the pan off the burner when the spinach looks almost done because even just sitting in the hot pan, the spinach will continue to wilt. If you keep the spinach in too long, you'll get a mush of spinach, again not so pretty.
- Throw spinach in a serving bowl, and voila, you're ready to nosh!
A couple notes:
- The salt part is important because nutmeg alone doesn't taste so lovely. The salt definitely perks up the dish.
- Next time, I'd try cinnamon or pumpkin pie spice.
- The garlic + nutmeg combo is definitely different. I'm not sure if it will be a hit with all, but I liked it. If you pair the nutmeg spinach with turkey or ham, it should compliment well.
