Spring for Spinach

Spring has arrived. Farmers across the country are busy planting their crops and many have started to harvest the first field-grown spinach of the season. Versatile and flavorful, spinach, like all the dark leafy greens, is also a nutritional powerhouse. It's high in the vitamins A, C, K and folate and is a good source of iron and magnesium (though not calcium, which oxalate acid in spinach inhibits our bodies from absorbing). Spinach also contains lutein, an antioxidant that protects against macular degeneration (a cause of loss of eyesight, especially in the elderly). But unlike many of the other dark leafy greens, spinach can be eaten raw and requires just about a minute to cook. These two factors make spinach far easier to incorporate into your daily meals. From soup to scrambled eggs, you can toss a handful of the delicate leaves into almost any recipe during the last minute of cooking; boosting its nutritional content, flavor and color.

The most important factor when cooking with spinach is to wash it thoroughly before use. In order to remove all the sand and grit that clings to spinach, cut off the roots and any thick stems then immerse the leaves in a deep container of cold water for 5 minutes, periodically swirling the spinach around so that the grit can fall to the bottom of the container, away from the spinach. To drain the leaves, gently lift them from the water's surface into a colander and allow the excess water to drip off. Don't pour the water and spinach through the colander or you will dump the grit from the bottom of the container back onto the spinach. Once the spinach is clean, wrap it in a paper towel and store it in a plastic bag in the refrigerator until you are ready to use it.

When it comes to organic versus local, I usually come down on the side of local farmers, but with spinach the decision is murky. Conventionally raised spinach contains high levels of pesticide residues—so high that spinach appears on the Environmental Working Group's "Dirty Dozen" list of most pesticide-laden produce. Yet large organic farms and processors have the opportunity to spread E. coli bacteria from a single field to thousands of packages of food. E. coli and other bacteria are "sticky" and aren't easily washed off of produce, and you only need to contaminate a package with a few individual bacterial cells to render it dangerous. While any field can be accidentally contaminated, small local farmers don't face the risks associated with processing plants. So in the case of spinach, the best bet is to buy local organic spinach whenever possible.

The following recipes are adapted from Spinach and Beyond: Loving Life and Dark Green Leafy Vegetables (2003, Moonfield Press, $11.95) by Linda Diane Feldt.