Spinach for breakfast

I stopped buying spinach some time in college. I hated washing it, or rather, I hated eating gritty spinach, which was usually how my roommates and I ate it, since we all hated the effort it took to wash it well. Then they started selling prewashed baby spinach in those cellophane bags, so I started buying spinach again. Then I got waste-conscious, and stopped buying spinach so I wasn’t using up all that plastic. Now I’m back to spinach. And if I thought it was gritty before…

But the spinach keeps coming, every week it comes, which means this time I don’t have a choice. So I fill a tub with water, I use kitchen shears to snip the leaves off their crowns, and I plunge them in. I swish them, then I rinse them, then I rinse them again. It’s a lot of work. But I’m finding I don’t mind. The spinach is there, so I clean it. It cooks up so tender and sometimes even sweet.

I usually eat the whole batch in one sitting, at breakfast time. I don’t know why spinach has become solely a breakfast food, although I do generally wake up craving eggs and greens. So once a week I wash and wash my spinach, saute it with some garlic and olive oil, and fold it into an omelette, or tuck it under some poached eggs, or eat it alongside something like the (unfortunately not very successful) potato-and-egg bake pictured above. And, when I sit down at last to eat my breakfast spinach, I feel like I can taste the satisfying flavor that comes from grit-free spinach, accomplished sans cellophane bag.

(For some more concrete ideas on how to use spinach for breakfast, please read Spinach for Breakfast, the Sequel!)