I’ll Have My Spinach with Cheese and Chocolate, Please | On the Table
“Chocolate is a vegetable,” read a sticky note placed on the refrigerator door in the kitchen of the office where I worked some years ago. I smiled when I read it — that chocolate could be consumed with other vegetables, a culinary path I was not interested in exploring at the time. Then something happened.
The inspiration for the dish I am sharing today came from three sources: fresh spinach from the farmers market; a Food & Wine recipe for spinach and goat cheese quiche; and my husband’s use of grated chocolate on cooked leafy greens and other savory dishes.
Fresh spinach (Spinacia oleracea) comes in bunches of whole plants or as mature loose leaves (it also comes as baby spinach, which is great in salads). I find spinach irresistible for its glorious greenness and how easily I can turn it into a side dish. Fresh spinach is flavorful, cooks fast and can be paired with savory flavors (like pancetta) or sweet (like raisins and toasted pine nuts).
I am not sure if children nowadays know about Popeye but the spinach-eating cartoon was popular in Italy when I was a child (as Braccio di Ferro), and his example worked wonders with my brother so that his dislike for vegetables did not include spinach. Sometimes my mother took advantage of the situation by calling other dark leafy greens she prepared “spinach” so he would eat them.
After reading the Food & Wine quiche recipe quickly (speed is something I advise against with recipes as it can lead to an unhappy ending), I thought it called for the goat cheese to be layered between the spinach and the crust, rather than used as a topping. Closer inspection revealed my misunderstanding, but the idea of goat cheese filling kept buzzing in my mind…
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