Wednesday, January 16, 2013

This week's recipe features spinach!

This week's ingredient for Judy's recipe challenge was spinach.  I made a creamed spinach sauce to serve over pasta.  
I bought fresh tortellini.  They cook in 3 minutes!  I made about 7 or 8 each for my DH and myself and saved the rest for another meal.  I like tortellini in soup too.
*
I based my recipe off this recipe.  But I am not even sure if I can get evaporated milk over here.  First I sauteed garlic in butter  probably 2 TBS because I like butter.  Stir in about 1 heaping TBS of flour to make a roux to thicken it all up.  Thinned that out and made sure there were no lumps by adding in 2 cups of chicken stock (I add chicken stock to lots of my cooking).  Added 1/3 cup of parm. cheese, 1/3 cup of white wine and about 2 heaping TBS of horseradish cream cheese.  I let that cook down some to get rid of the wine taste.  Then I added 1/2 a box of finely shredded spinach.  Added probably 2 TBS of whipping cream - because I like whipping cream.  Besides, I can figure out what whipping cream is in the store - evaporated milk - I might not be so lucky since my German skills are seriously lacking! 

Here is a picture of it all cooking.  I didn't "cook" that spinach per say - that is my method of "defrosting" it - ha ha. I put the frozen block in a hot pan and keep flipping it over and over and scrapping of the defrosted spinach from the block at the same time.  I am impatient that way!  I guess it got cooked a bit in the process.  The resulting spinach sauce was really good... as far as spinach sauces are concerned.  I hate to admit it, but I tend to cook the same favorite foods over and over again.  I do not cook cabbage or spinach all that often - although we do eat it.
*
In the meantime, we still had 1/4 of a cabbage left over from the cabbage casserole (I bought a 1/2 head - which is a nice option if you don't want a ton of cabbage!).
*
DH made a marinade of cooked Worcestershire sauce, a little olive oil, and cooked bacon bits.  Over here though it really isn't bacon bits- it is small pieces of uncooked bacon that you have to cook in the  frying pan.  Anyway - he wrapped it all in tinfoil and baked it for about an hour.  I think it would be a good dish for a beef entree - we tend to eat more chicken, but I will remember this for the once in a blue moon that we have beef!
You can read all about Judy's very good sounding stuffed spinach meatloaf on her blog, as well as what everyone else made this week who cooked with spinach!  Next week's ingredient to cook with is creamed corn - I will have to check at the store and see if I can manage to find some!  

1 comment:

Lori said...

Evelyn---the spinach sauce looks so nice on the pasta--YUM!! We like cooked cabbage here--I often bake it in with pork roast--preferably with a few potatoes and parsnips in the pan too.