Stir-Fried Garlic Spinach - the Pinnacle of Yum

This spinach has earned a permanent place in my kitchen repertoire. It's so tasty, so fast and so easy that I just can't quit it. Not that I'd ever want to quit it...

It comes by way of Grace Young's lovely cookbook, The Breath of a Wok, which my husband gave me as a gift after we returned from a trip to Southeast Asia what feels like a lifetime ago (we were so young...)

I've been making Auntie Yi's Stir-Fried Garlic Spinach ever since. It's so easy that I always feel a little like I'm cheating somehow. The seasoning is incredibly simple - a tablespoon of rice mirin mixed with equal parts sugar and salt.

There are just two things that you need to do to make this a truly stand-out dish:

1. Use really fresh, flavorful spinach - it makes a huge difference in the taste.
2. Get your wok (or wide, flat-bottomed pan if you don't have a wok) really, really hot and don't crowd the spinach. If you want to make more than one bunch of spinach, do it in two batches to ensure you can really stir-fry it effectively.

When I saw the first spinach of the season from Taliaferro Farms in the produce section of my health food store last week, looking all gorgeous and tender and a practically radioactive shade of green that only occurs in the spring, I knew this would be on the menu.

A little washing and drying, chopping, mixing and stir-frying and BOOM, we were in business.

As always, it was SO GOOD!

Stir-Fried Garlic Spinach minimally adapted from Grace Young's excellent book The Breath of a Wok
Serves 4 as a side

Ingredients

* 2 Tbsp vegetable or peanut oil
* 1 Tbsp minced garlic
* 1 bunch fresh spinach (about 10 ounces)
* 1/2 tsp sea salt
* 1/2 tsp cane sugar
* 1 Tbsp rice mirin or dry sherry
* 1-2 tsps toasted sesame seeds (optional)

Directions

1. Heat a 14-inch flat bottomed wok over high heat until a bead of water vaporizes within 1 to 2 seconds of contact. Swirl in the oil, add the garlic and stir-fry for 10 seconds.

2. Add all the spinach and stir-fry for 10 seconds.

3. Add the salt, sugar and rice wine and stir-fry for 1-2 minutes or until the spinach is just tender but still bright green. Garnish with the sesame seeds (if you like them, that is) and serve.

You might also like:

• Curried Quinoa Cakes with Spinach
• Spinach Salad with Warm Bacon Dressing & Caramelized Onions
• Grilled Asparagus with Sesame-Soy-Garlic Marinade

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Herbed Rice & Cucumber Salad With Wild Garlic

Sometimes I want my rice to be a little more interesting and nutritious. So I make this simple, refreshing salad.

As with almost all of my favorite recipes, it's flexible - you can choose different herbs, leave the scallions or wild garlic out, add more of it, whatever you feel like.

Start by cooking the rice. I used an organic basmati from Thailand as it's apparently got some of the lowest arsenic levels around but you can use any rice you like. Unfortunately, brown rice, which is far more nutritious than white rice, tends to have higher arsenic levels. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Sigh.

Then wash, dry and chop the herbs of your choice. For this batch, I used a mix of cilantro, dill and wild garlic I'd just harvested from our yard.

Chop up half a large cucumber. I usually peel mine unless it's coming from the garden in which case, I leave the skin on.

Toss it all together with some olive oil, salt and pepper and you're ready to eat. This salad goes really nicely with grilled veggies, meat or fish.

Herbed Rice & Cucumber Salad
Serves 4-6 as a side

Ingredients

* 1 1/2 cups rice
* 1/2 fresh cucumber, washed, peeled and cut into a medium sized dice
* A big handful of fresh herbs of your choice - cilantro, parsley, dill, etc., washed, dried and coarsely chopped
* 2-3 fresh scallions or wild garlic, cleaned and chopped
* 2 Tbsps olive oil
* Sea salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Directions

1. Wash and drain the rice and cook according to the directions on the package or for whatever kind you wish to use.

2. While the rice is cooking, prep the herbs, cucumber and scallions or wild garlic.

3. When the rice is finished, add one Tbsp of olive oil, fluff it with a fork, dump it out into whatever bowl you plan to serve the salad in and let it cool off a bit.

4. Once the rice has cooled, add the herbs, cucumber, scallions or wild garlic, final Tbsp of olive oil and season with sea salt and black pepper to taste. Toss it gently to ensure that everything gets evenly distributed and serve.

You might also like:

• Lime, Jalapeño & Corn Quinoa Salad
• Easy, Nutty Herbed Farro Salad
• Quinoa, Feta, Corn & Herb Salad

Want even more recipes, photos, giveaways, and food-related inspiration? "Like" the Garden of Eating on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter or Pinterest.

Eat Your Weeds - Wild Garlic a.k.a. Onion Grass or Field Garlic

Spring has (sort of) arrived here in the Northeast and despite the somewhat chilly temps, there are signs of life returning. A pair of robins is building a nest on top of the light outside our kitchen window. They're all business, darting and swooping as they carry building material - mostly muddy straw from our garden beds - back to weave it all together. The wild ramps we transplanted last summer have mostly come up (hurray!) Daffodils and forsythias have colored large swathes of the landscape yellow and the green is slowly beginning to creep in. And the wild garlic is up!

If you're not already familiar with wild garlic, you shouldn't have any trouble finding it. Just look for tall patches of green that make the grass around it look lazy in comparison. As it gets bigger, it sometimes does some crazy curling, too.

If you're not sure if you've got the right plant, break off a blade/leaf and give it a sniff. If it smells like garlic or onion, you're in business. If it does not smell "stinky", drop it -- there are a number of look-alike plants, some of which are toxic. But you can trust anything that smells like garlic or onion (wild garlic and wild onion look very similar.)

The entire plant is edible from the leaves to the bulb. You can use the greens just like you would use fresh chives. Just snip them off with some scissors, wash them well in a few changes of water to get off dirt, sand and bugs, and chop them up however you like.

Or you can dig up the whole plant and spend a bit more time cleaning it to make use of the bulb, too. It's similar to a very small shallot. Just a note that our soil is fairly clay-heavy so the bulbs shown here are pretty small - if your dirt is more friable, yours may be bigger!

Sidenote: harvesting wild garlic is a great way to keep kids entertained outdoors and teach them about foraging. I did this with my almost-5-year-old the other day - he got really into it and I got twenty minutes to myself and a whole bunch of wild garlic for the soy-ginger marinade I was making.

What's not to love? It's free, uber local, utterly sustainable (these are considered weeds...), delicious and good for you.

Wild garlic is wonderful in this flavorful, refreshing cucumber rice salad and I  also recommend chopping some up and adding them to your next vinaigrette, with or without some fresh herbs.

Or try tossing them with a little olive oil and salt and giving them a quick grill - we did this the other night and had to fight our older son for them!

You could also substitute them in pretty much any recipe that calls for ramps, shallots, scallions or chives with lovely results.

You might also like:

Harvesting Wild Ramps SUSTAINABLY

Miner's Lettuce, a Delicious Wild Green (Northwest US)

Eat The Invasives - Garlic Mustard Greens