Spinach Appetizer

Roasting the peanuts

This all-season spinach appetizer is extremely simple and quick. Spinach is sold everywhere, all year round. Here it is usually not very big: a bunch with its roots is no longer than your palm. Unshelled, unroasted peanuts are easy to find too.

Raw peanuts can be bought already roasted, but the dish loses a lot of aroma that way. It is better to use unshelled peanuts, which taste better because they have almost certainly not been blanched beforehand.

1. Roast the peanuts: put them in a bowl, drizzle with 1 tsp of peanut oil and toss. In a small skillet over medium heat, roast the nuts, stirring, until they smell good – this takes 10 mins at most. Then let the peanuts cool.

   

Blanching the spinach

2. Blanch the spinach. Prepare very cold water and add plenty of ice from the freezer. Boil water in a kettle or heat it in a pot. Wash the spinach thoroughly to get rid of the sand – there is always some – and cut off the roots and the very bottom tips of the leaves. Put the spinach in a bowl and pour boiling water over it for 30–40 seconds, no longer. Quickly move the greens to a colander and dip them in the ice water until the leaves are cool.

   

3. Squeeze out and chop the spinach. After cooling, drain the water and gently squeeze the leaves by hand to remove as much water as possible while keeping the spinach whole. It is also worth blotting them with a paper towel or kitchen towel. Cut the leaves fairly coarsely with a knife, every 3–4 cm, then fluff them a little so they separate. Put them in a salad bowl and season with a pinch of salt.

   

Dressing and assembly

4. Make the salad dressing. Pour the soy sauce and black vinegar (you can use sushi rice vinegar instead) into a small cup, add the brown sugar and stir until dissolved. Peel the garlic and ginger and finely chop them with the fresh chili, then mix with the rest of the sauce ingredients. The spinach appetizer should be noticeably hot and sour, so decide for yourself how much dressing and add-ins to use.

   

5. Mix the spinach with the ground peanuts and the dressing. Sort through the cooled roasted peanuts: keep the whole nuts for serving and grind the damaged ones in a blender into a coarse “meal”. Add the ground peanuts to the spinach in the salad bowl, pour the dressing over and toss lightly so everything is evenly distributed.

   

Serving

6. Before serving, sprinkle the appetizer with whole roasted nuts and serve right away. The salad needs no chilling or resting. Eat it at once and do not save it “for later”.

   

   You can use young spinach or fairly mature spinach, just increase the blanching time. Green lettuce and its relatives also work, as do chard, amaranth, Chinese cabbage and so on. For the dressing you can use your own favorites, but with as little oil as possible or none at all.