Lei

Part I - The Spinach

It's almost six o'clock and my stomach is starting to produce some hollow gurgling noises. There's some chicken breasts in the freezer but, they're frozen. A container of Haagen Daaz sits waiting to be eaten but not right now. Below the fridge seems desolate as there's just a few containers of juices, soy milk, a half used bottle of olive and black mushroom spaghetti sauce and some balsamic vinagrette salad dressing. On the door are the condiments, some old personal sized bottles of kahlua, and a partly used brick of salted butter. As I lean down further, I see a bag of spinach which was hidden by a large container of apple juice from my view. I grab the spinach and put it on the counter. All it needs is a quick rinse as it has been presorted and cleaned already.

Walking over to the pantry, I open one of the doors and grab the stainless steel frying pan with its lid. The light above the stove is turned on and the large element on the back right starts to heat up while I reach for the grapeseed oil. Apparently its supposed to be better for you so I decided to try it instead of vegetable oil. As I wave my hand just a few centimeters above the pan I can feel the heat already. A couple squirts of oil is added so that the spinach won't stick plus a couple large chunks of butter for flavour. I throw in the spinach and it begins to cook right away. What started out as a big bushel of vibrant green leaves has shrunk down becoming dark, limp and without form in a matter of seconds.

As it sits, the buttered vegetables would still be fine along some sort of meat but I've done this before. As an experiment, I took some of the cranberry grape juice and added it to the pan. Even though I don't have any cooking wine, this should work. They're all made with berries of some variety. Some soy sauce is added to offset whatever sourness from the cranberry juice. A bit more butter and the newly reduced concoction is a slightly fruity but rich sauce. What would have been better is if I had seared some meat in the pan beforehand to use as part of a base for the sauce once deglazed.

I sprinkle some freshly ground black pepper before tasting a portion of the spinach first, then the sauce with it. It gets a thumbs up from me this time. There have been worse. Yet as with most of my adventures in experimental cooking, I don't often make the same thing twice. Maybe I should so that everything isn't such an experiment each time and I won't feel as lost either. Lets see what else is in the fridge...