So Many Dishes

I’m a planner. I don’t really like to let things go until the last minute. In cooking terms, that means weekly menu planning and shopping with a grocery list created from that menu. Sometimes we’ll leave an “open” night on the menu, but it’s rare that I don’t have a plan.

Then there are the nights when plans just go out the window, and last evening was one of those. I’d already known that I was going to have to improvise on my side dish; I didn’t expect to have to do the same for the entree we’d planned.

Ken and I both like spinach, and I have a fair number of recipes that incorporate it into the dish. We rarely cook spinach as a side, though, and then I’ll usually make creamed spinach. I have a good reduced-fat version that we enjoy. Ken read something recently about the health benefits of spinach, so we decided to include more in our diet. This week’s menu included a soup that uses spinach (I’ll be posting that recipe in the next few days), and sautéed spinach as a side for two dinners.

The first place I go when I’m thinking about sides is The Side Dish Bible from America’s Test Kitchen. This cookbook rarely lets me down, but it certainly did this time. I decided to try two versions of sautéed spinach, one with garlic and lemon, the other with golden raisins. The latter was supposed to include almonds, too, but, as I’ve said before, Ken doesn’t like nuts in food.

The ATK method calls for microwaving the spinach before sautéing. My first attempt at sautéed spinach, the garlic and lemon version, resulted in a tasty but inadequate pile of green mush. An entire bag of baby spinach had cooked down to probably less than a cup of unappetizing goo. We are it, looked at each other, and said, “we’re not doing that again.” I started searching the internet, and wound up at Simply Recipes, a site I’ve used in the past and whose recipes I trust. They don’t include the microwave step; they simply toss the spinach in the pan with olive oil and seasonings. So I adapted this method to the ingredients in the second ATK recipe, and the result was delicious.

The spinach was supposed to accompany an old favorite, steak with creamy horseradish sauce, from the South Beach Diet Quick & Easy cookbook. This is a no-brainer: pan-grilled sirloin topped with horseradish mixed into reduced-fat sour cream. The only problem was that I had forgotten to get sour cream! The market where we do the bulk of our shopping these days is undergoing renovations, and every visit is an adventure. They didn’t have any reduced-fat sour cream last week, so I had planned to get it at the other store we shop at the next day. Somehow, it didn’t make it onto my list. I didn’t realize it until I’d started heating the pan to cook the steak. Ken’s advice was to make a different sauce, but what? I flipped the cookbook page, and there was a recipe for steak sandwiches with a roasted red pepper mayonnaise. I had a partial jar of roasted peppers in the fridge, so with some quick chopping and a healthy spoonful of mayo, we had a sauce.

It was a good reminder that improvisational skills come in just as handy in cooking as in music.