Last night I went to a firm summer event at The Kitchen, a Columbus institution where a team of expert cooks instructs your group on your preparation of your own meal. An evening at The Kitchen is always a fun event, because cooking is fun and conducive to conversation while you are working on food preparation. Last night was no exception.
I was on the “garlicky spinach” team. This assignment required us to first separate, peel, and chop up garlic cloves, which was the easy part. After that we headed over to the stove, tossed some butter and the garlic pieces into the colossal iron pot shown above, let the butter melt and the garlic open up and provide the room with that wonderful garlic smell, then added some milk and some heavy cream to establish a kind of creamy base.
Next came the hard part: adding tubs of raw spinach, handful by heaping handful, to the pot and stirring the resulting mixture until is began to reduce–at which point even more handfuls of raw spinach were added by overzealous members of our group, Repeat that process over and over, and soon you are toiling away over a hot stove, using a wooden spoon to try to budge and turn over huge mounds of wet spinach. Every time we finished a tub, another one took its place. A staff member told us that, in all, we eventually stirred and reduced 15 pounds of raw spinach, ultimately producing the brimming potful of garlicky goodness shown above. Add in some freshly grated nutmeg and salt and pepper, and finally you’re done.
Here’s the thing about stirring that much spinach–it’s not your arm muscles that get the workout, it’s your finger and hand muscles clutching the thin handle of the wooden spoon and then using it to lift mounds of wet spinach and navigate them around the pot. If you’d tried to shake the hand of the team member who was fresh off stirring duty, you’d get a pretty poor, exhausted grip in return. I imagine that the professional sous chefs who do this kind of work for a living, in contrast, have developed the hand and finger muscles that can give you a pretty crushing handshake even after hours of ceaseless stirring.
After we were done, we sat down to enjoy our meal, and I have to say that the garlicky spinach was pretty tasty–although the highlight of the meal for me was that summer dessert classic, strawberry shortcake featuring freshly baked biscuits.
Webner House 