Spinach, Sophia Loren and China

14Nov09

I love spinach. It’s my favorite leafy green, I like the slight bitterness that it can bring to a dish, like the simplicity. I recently got Sophia Loren’s cookbook. I think it’s ever so slightly more sophisticated than the core cookbooks that I prefer and that I find myself returning to year after year, like Elizabeth David. The recipes have a little flair often. But the book is very nice overall. So recently I made her monk-style spinach, called Monaco. It was the same, basically, as the standard spinach saute with garlic… except for a single little step. Rather than letting the spinach cook through the water, Loren takes it out when it’s basically cooked, when there’s still a good amount of moisture bubbling away, and she squeezes the spinach and dries it, and discards (I rather put it into the pasta water) the water. Then Loren prepares the saute by bringing the garlic to the golden color and sautees the spinach.

It makes a big difference — a simple little trick like that.

Then today I made a spinach pancake in what I consider a Chinese style. It was inspired by my wife’s Korean pa-jeon, which is excellent, but which I don’t know how to cook, and which requires seafood, which I didn’t have. So I looked in Lo’s book for pancakes, and I found a pancake involving zucchini. But zucchini and spinach both put out a lot of water when cooked, I thought, so I could probably get away with substituting spinach for zucchini. (I’ve gotten to the point where I didn’t like zucchini precisely because there’s so much of it in the farmers’ markets and everywhere and it’s basically just a very plain vegetable; but now I think I’m getting over my disenchantment with zucchini and I might start buying it again. I think it was Madison who said something like a good zucchini is good, and it’s true.) in any case, the substitution worked, so here’s what I did.

First you dry-roast 2 tb peanuts in your wok. Then you take them out and you crush them in wax paper with a rolling pin, they exude oil when you do that, which I thought was pretty neat. Maybe that’s where peanut oil came from. Anyway, then you chop your spinach, a good amount, add 1 beaten egg, 2 chopped green onions, mostly the green, 4.5 tb flour, .5 tb Shouxin wine, .5 tb sugar, 1 tb soy sauce. This is the batter, it doesn’t look like it’s going to hold but it does. Then you heat up your wok on high, add 3.5tb peanut oil and fry for about 2-3min. Be careful not to let the bottom side burn, (I overcooked a little). Take out the pancake and flip it back in, lower the heat and cook until done.

It’s pretty good, reminds me faintly of pa-jeon, but pa-jeon is better — it’s a family recipe.

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Tags: chinese, pancake, sophialoren, spinach