Once again, Kyle has a big, bountiful vegetable garden. He cultivates and cares for it year-round – building and filling boxes and containers, planning and planting for optimal siting and growth, weeding and watering, and keeping our children and rabbits (not our rabbits…although they live under our shed, so maybe our rabbits) away to the best of his abilities. For my part, I buy random seed packets when I pass by them at the grocery store and leave them on the kitchen counter.
One of those Amanda-procured seed packets was spinach. Our nine-year-old rivals Popeye as a spinach consumer and has been known to eat it by the fistful. As his affinity for spinach(‘s iron) is probably due to his inconsistent hatred of red meat – he likes hamburgers and taco meat, abhors ground beef – my thought was that he could save me a trip to the grocery store and just gnaw on it straight from the garden like the bunnies.
“The spinach is probably ready to be harvested,” Kyle said a couple of weeks ago after a garden-tending afternoon. “Grab it whenever you want.”
“Great,” I said, not paying attention because I was wrapped up in something really important on my phone.
A week later, Kyle reminded me of the spinach while we were out to lunch.
“The spinach is really ready,” he said in between bites. “Can we take a look at the garden tonight?”
“Sure can,” I said, focused more on my ranch dressing than his request.
This past Saturday, as I was enjoying my coffee and phone and ranch dressing, Kyle sat down beside me on the couch.
“Would you please do something about the spinach?” He said. “I’m worried it’s going to choke out the other vegetables.”
“Fine,” I said. “Although you could have given me a bit more of a head’s up.”
On Sunday, I went out to the garden. The spinach was, indeed, robust – so robust, in fact, that I decided I needed a game plan for using up giant quantities of spinach. For the next hour, I scoured the Internet (good thing I’m so experienced on my phone!) for spinach recipes that froze well. After a great deal of mental gymnastics, my path forward was thus: 1) Harvest the spinach, 2) wash the spinach, 3) set some spinach aside for dinner that evening and lunch the next day, 4) use a small portion of the remaining spinach to make spinach dip, and 5) bag the rest of it so as to make tons and tons of spinach lasagna later in the week.
It turns out spinach is similar to herbs in that you can get two or three growing cycles out of a single planting if you cut the leaves off at the right spot. The first five or six stalks took me roughly 30 minutes to harvest because every time I removed a leaf I became fearful that I had killed the plant and needed to rewatch the YouTube video to ensure I had not. Also, a couple of times I accidentally pulled the whole plant out by the roots and then spent too much time trying to shove it back in the dirt before figuring I was “thinning out” the garden and it would ultimately be better for everything. Once I got the process down, it took me another 45 minutes to harvest and thin out the rest. The end result filled four giant grocery bags to the tippy-top.
It took me another hour to wash the spinach because there was so fricking much of it. The rule with spinach is that it should be washed three times to get the dirt and Dawn dish soap particles off (our kids’ favorite activity is to cover our trampoline in Dawn and hose water and bounce in the bubbles), so I did that.
Here’s an interesting fact: spinach is 93% water. It actually has so much water that you can use it as a form of hydration. While that water is very good for your body it’s not very good for keeping spinach un-slimy, so I laid a bunch of it out on the counter on towels to dry out while I got the steamer ready for the spinach dip. It was at this point that Nine, called by the siren song of the spinach, materialized in the kitchen.
“Can I try a piece?” He said, sticking a leaf in his mouth before I could answer.
“You can have as much as you want,” I said, assuming he’d take one or two leaves and go about his business.
“YUM,” he said, lifting up the bottom of his t-shirt to form a makeshift basket and stuffing in as much spinach as he could. Then he left to go back to whatever he was doing prior (probably trampolining or chasing rabbits). I surveyed the counter; the pile was barely changed.
Here’s my recipe for spinach dip: One large container of sour cream, one cup of mayonnaise, one packet of leek soup mix, and a crap-ton of steamed spinach. The measurement of crap-ton is exact, as there is really no point when a person would think, “Oh, whoops, too much spinach,” because if you put in too much spinach, a magical phenomenon occurs where the sour cream just absorbs it as if it never existed. If you decide to fancy it up with grilled onions or cooked artichokes, those cannot be any more than a cup total. The spinach, on the other hand, can be slightly less than infinity.
If you decide to make this recipe on your own, you have to remember to squeeze as much water as possible out of the steamed spinach. It seems counterintuitive to do so because you’re squeezing out the nutrients and the hydration and the soul of the spinach, but no one wants watery spinach dip. That would be gross.
I started steaming. And squeezing. And steaming. And more squeezing. And steaming. And even more squeezing. Each time I thought I was done steaming I’d look at my little pile of squeezed steamed spinach and think, “Erm, not really a crap-ton yet,” and add some more to the pot.
Finally, I had enough for the spinach dip. It was a good thing I hadn’t bought the lasagna ingredients yet, because by the time I was done steaming all I had left on the counter was enough to serve salad at dinner. I chopped up the steamed spinach, made the spinach dip (thirty seconds), cleaned up the kitchen (an hour because I stopped in the middle to pat myself on the back while sitting on the front porch reading a book), made dinner (hot dogs; five minutes), and then made everyone in the house applaud me for the greatest spinach dip they’d ever eaten – because I’d just spent an entire day (plus the entire gardening and growing season) with nothing more to show for it than an appetizer.
For his part, Nine ate his t-shirt spinach and then went digging around in the fridge for more.
“Sorry, buddy,” I told him. “That’s it for now. We have to wait for it to grow back.”
“How long will that take?” He asked.
“I don’t know, a few weeks?” I said. “We can go to the grocery store and get some more in the meantime.”
“Maybe we should go to the grocery store every time,” he said. “Seems faster.”
“You’re not wrong,” I said, taking a bite of dip.
The photo above is of Kyle transporting a golf club. Our son had forgotten it at the course, and so we biked over and Kyle stuck it down his shirt.
“That’s not going to work,” I had said.
“This is how I carried my baseball bat when I was a kid, so I guarantee it will work,” he said.
It worked.
This week on North Dakota Today we talked about Lacey Burdick, today’s Nice Person of the Week, as well as a unique take on a lemonade stand. Enjoy! (Valley News Live)
This is the very brief story (and picture!) of the first automobile with a steering wheel built in North Dakota. (Facebook)
The first line of this story says it all: “Grand Forks’ Shelby Frank has become the only woman at the U.S. Olympic Trials to reach the finals in both the discus and hammer throw.” (Grand Forks Herald)
The Dakota Aged Iron Club took their antique tractors out for the first spin of the season. You can see them next in Flasher on June 29. (KFYR TV)
Bismarck’s Taylor Vogel was tapped (or mic’d) to sing the National Anthem at the College World Series. (KFYR TV)
The Kind Hearts Project gave out 100 bikes – and hot dogs, hamburgers, and popcorn – to kids in Dickinson. (Dickinson Press)
Congratulations to Jaycee Parker of Minot Air Force Base, who was recently crowned Miss North Dakota Teen USA! (Minot Daily News)
The artists of FargoMoorhead Rocks are making the eastern part of the state a little more colorful. (Valley News Live)
Kyle and his friends, Corey and Kelly, have a podcast called North Dakota After Dark where they talk about youth hockey in North Dakota. The latest episode is up and is an interview with Kyle Kosior himself. Check it out. Bonus: you can watch it on YouTube. (North Dakota After Dark)
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