Nevin Halici's Sour Spinach

It felt like divine comedy when, after an entire week of cooking absolutely nothing, the one thing I chose to make for dinner last night turned out to be awful. Not fit for eating awful. Scraped into the bin awful. It's been a while since I got a real doozy, but I made up for lost time last night.

The recipe comes from one of Turkey's most famous food writers, Nevin Halici. Halici is a Sufi, and recently wrote a cookbook featuring recipes mentioned by one of the world's most famous Sufis, the poet Rumi, in his poems.

I was totally enchanted by the idea of making a one-pot lamb stew for dinner that Rumi had mused about more than 700 hundred years ago and set out happily to gather my ingredients for dinner. But that damned FDA warning had cleared out fresh spinach from all the grocery stores I frequent. I wasn't even looking for baby spinach in clear bags (which, by the way, I think is an abomination and should be banned from the free market for the plain fact that it tastes bad. Who on God's green earth ever came up with the ridiculous idea that spinach tastes good raw?)

I used the best substitute I could muster, a bunch of rainbow chard. At home, I set about sauteeing an onion in butter, added cubed lamb to brown, and then simmered both in water until the lamb was tender. But this didn't exactly happen. The lamb grew tough and rubbery, and the more I simmered, the more stubbornly hard it got.

So I went ahead with the recipe, adding some bulgur and the chopped chard and cooking it until both were tender. When I poured in the requisite amount of pomegranate molasses, I did think to myself that it seemed like an awful lot. But what did I know? If it was good enough for Rumi, it was good enough for me.

Yeah.

I'm not sure I'll really stick with that pronouncement from here on out. The stew was sickly sweet and unpleasantly sour - as if I had melted green apple Jolly Ranchers down between the chunks of meat. If I picked out the lamb (chewy, rubbery lamb) and ate a piece with a mouthful of rice it was bearable, but with the bulgur-spotted, chardy sauce? Absolutely, positively awful.

Maybe it was the brand of pomegranate molasses? Perhaps a tablespoon would have been better than a quarter-cup? If you feel like figuring that out, be my guest. I'm not sure I've got the stomach for it.

Nevin Halici's Sour Spinach
Serves 4

1 1/4 pounds spinach (about 2 bunches), stemmed
3 tablespoons butter
1 onion, minced
1/2 pound boneless lamb, cut in 1/2-inch pieces
1/4 cup bulgur
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup pomegranate molasses, or to taste

1. Wash, drain and chop the spinach. Set aside.

2. Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and fry until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the lamb and brown with the onions, about 5 minutes. Add 2 1/4 cups water and simmer until the lamb is quite tender, 30 to 40 minutes.

3. Stir in the bulgur and salt and add the spinach. Cover and cook over low heat until the spinach is done, 8 to 10 minutes.

4. Stir in the pomegranate molasses. Bring the mixture to a boil, remove from the heat and let it stand 10 minutes before serving. Serve with rice.

Comments

[jnet]

in times of desperation...u should have tried FROZEN chopped spinach. i know that fresh is obviously better, but for this recipe, it looks like frozen would have been a better substitute.

i'm sorry your dinner turned out to be a disaster tho. =(

[Julie]

"...as if I had melted green apple Jolly Ranchers down between the chunks of meat," sounds really, really bad. Super-colossal bad. But it gave me a good laugh.

I'm a little disappointed though. I was so excited when I read your title. I'm always looking for spinach recipes and sour spinach sounded so promising. Too bad.

[veuveclicquot]

This sounds delicious! I'll be making it tonight!!! Just kidding. Your description is priceless. :)

Sorry you had such a terrible experience with this recipe. Funny how some things sound delightful and end up being worse than catastrophic...!

[deb]

Oh no! The most cruel part is that it looks delicious.

When things go wrong in the kitchen, I always want to throw a foot-stomping temper tantrum. This week's massive cupcake blob was no different, and even the act of trying to objectively write about it took a lot of deep yogic breaths.

Now that we've done our time, here's to several more unbroken weeks, at least, of flawless experiments.

[Molly]

Oh Luisa, I hear you. This past weekend I bought a couple of bunches of beautiful organic dandelion greens, having read that they are good in salads. Um, well, as it turns out, they are completely inedible in salads. Even the wee little baby leaves, the cute little tiny ones, were crazily bitter. I trashed the whole bowlful. But I still had about 1 1/2 bunches to contend with, so I looked up a couple of recipes and settled on cooking them the same way I do broccoli rabe - boiling them for a few minutes; then draining them and sauteing them in a good bit of olive oil with garlic and red pepper. The result? Also inedible. Horribly inedible. We chucked the whole mess into the trash can after two bites each. Crazy, crazy bad stuff.

Here's to a more successful weekend for both of us, my friend!

[Mary Sue]

I like raw spinach!

But I never said I weren't crazy.

[Anne]

Oh Luisa, this is why I love your blog so much. You include the good, the bad and the sour spinach.

I'm not a fan of boiling chard. It always tastes murky to me. It stems from a time I boiled a bunch and added curry sauce. It was horrible!

[Anne]

Also, Molly is right. Dandelion greens are horrid little creatures that look deceptively cute

[tokyoastrogirl]

I'm not sure I'll ever be able to enjoy a green apple Jolly Rancher in the same way ever again. Meat & Jolly Rancher.....some things are just wrong, and that is high on the list.

[ganda]

Amen and Halle-E.coli-lujah re: raw spinach! I abhor that texture. Squick-squeak, squick-squeak.

[Garrett]

We've all had an instance or two where or newest creationg taste like poo.

I know I've called for a pizza on more than one occassion.
>^.^<

[Luisa]

Jnet - I actually love swiss chard...I think the funky sauce was what ruined this for me.

Julie and Veuve - Well, I am so glad this gave you a laugh! It was worth it then ;)

Deb - Amen to that!

Molly - oh no! That sounds like a true kitchen disaster... and you were so brave to keep trying, too!

Mary Sue - I am so judgmental, arent I? ;)

Anne - well, thank you! And yuck - curried chard does not sound like a good time.

Ann - EXACTLY.

Ganda - hee. That texture! Almost worse than the taste.

Garrett - THATS what we should have done!

[Julie]

There really are few things worse than putting time, effort and money into making what you hope will be a delicious dinner, and having it turn out -- well, like that. I'm kind of surprised that the recipe doesn't specify a particular cut of lamb. If you were using shoulder or neck, it probably needs quite a bit more than 1/2 hour to become tender. If you were using leg, it was tender to begin with and probably became progressively tough because it doesn't take to long cooking. Somehow I have the feeling that with judicious tweaking (yeah, like WAAAY less pomegranate molasses) this could actual be edible, if not delicious. But I can understand if you've lost heart for this one.