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tales of mushy green stuff
Mar. 16th, 2011 09:27 pmA kilogram of spinach is a LOT of spinach.
Really. A lot. It's a huge quantity of spinach.
But recipe #11 - spinach and ricotta cannelloni - specified a kilogram of spinach, so I duly went forth and came home with massive amounts of it.
...too much, in fact, to fit in my saucepan. I had to spend an hour and a half rotating bits of spinach in and out of boiling water, so that it'd all get properly cooked.
Eventually, it ended up sitting soggily in a big bowl, where I was supposed to wring the rest of the water out of it by hand.
Aaaaand that's when I found out just how long it takes boiled spinach to cool down enough to not burn your hands when you pick it up and squish it. (Approximately an hour, taking one teeny handful at a time.)
Of course, getting squishy spinachy gunk is not the end of the recipe: I had to combine it with cheese, eggs, and herbs, and smoosh it around the bowl some more - also with my hands... which were getting pretty messy by this point.
Mind you, mushy green gunk is pretty fun to play with.
Which is good, because I had to play with it a lot.
(On reflection, I can see why the first thing the recipe says is "You don't have to cook it right away! It can stay in the fridge all night!", because once you've actually finished making this thing, you're completely sick of the sight of it.)
Anyway, post-mushing, I had to get all the mush into the cannelloni.
Unfortunately, my piping equipment gave up halfway through and stubbornly refusing to keep piping anything that wasn't icing. So I had to push the rest of the spinach into the cannelloni tubes by hand. (Or rather, by finger.)
I am now sitting down to an astonishingly late dinner - of meatloaf; the cannelloni's for tomorrow - which will be followed by an even later bedtime, and I still haven't even finished cleaning up the kitchen. But I don't really care, because... cannelloni! I MADE CANNELLONI! SPINACH AND RICOTTA CANNELLONI! ALL BY MYSELF! I ROCK!
(If I wasn't so stupidly ambitious, I'd happily get through my 52 recipes with mashed potatoes and scrambled eggs and stuff like that. That'd be so much less frustrating. But then again, if I wasn't so ambitious, I wouldn't be doing this whole recipe thing in the first place...)
Really. A lot. It's a huge quantity of spinach.
But recipe #11 - spinach and ricotta cannelloni - specified a kilogram of spinach, so I duly went forth and came home with massive amounts of it.
...too much, in fact, to fit in my saucepan. I had to spend an hour and a half rotating bits of spinach in and out of boiling water, so that it'd all get properly cooked.
Eventually, it ended up sitting soggily in a big bowl, where I was supposed to wring the rest of the water out of it by hand.
Aaaaand that's when I found out just how long it takes boiled spinach to cool down enough to not burn your hands when you pick it up and squish it. (Approximately an hour, taking one teeny handful at a time.)
Of course, getting squishy spinachy gunk is not the end of the recipe: I had to combine it with cheese, eggs, and herbs, and smoosh it around the bowl some more - also with my hands... which were getting pretty messy by this point.
Mind you, mushy green gunk is pretty fun to play with.
Which is good, because I had to play with it a lot.
(On reflection, I can see why the first thing the recipe says is "You don't have to cook it right away! It can stay in the fridge all night!", because once you've actually finished making this thing, you're completely sick of the sight of it.)
Anyway, post-mushing, I had to get all the mush into the cannelloni.
Unfortunately, my piping equipment gave up halfway through and stubbornly refusing to keep piping anything that wasn't icing. So I had to push the rest of the spinach into the cannelloni tubes by hand. (Or rather, by finger.)
I am now sitting down to an astonishingly late dinner - of meatloaf; the cannelloni's for tomorrow - which will be followed by an even later bedtime, and I still haven't even finished cleaning up the kitchen. But I don't really care, because... cannelloni! I MADE CANNELLONI! SPINACH AND RICOTTA CANNELLONI! ALL BY MYSELF! I ROCK!
(If I wasn't so stupidly ambitious, I'd happily get through my 52 recipes with mashed potatoes and scrambled eggs and stuff like that. That'd be so much less frustrating. But then again, if I wasn't so ambitious, I wouldn't be doing this whole recipe thing in the first place...)