Spinach parfait

Spinach "Cupcake" parfait - Popeye sure would love that one...

Last time when we went back to my hometown, I was very happy to meet up with my godmother who I have not seen in a very long time. A surprise that was skilfully prepared by my mom. She had the great idea to present my wife with a pictured cookbook: Germany - a culinary tour. The book contains a good number of typical German dishes alongside with some pictures and their recipes (sounds a bit like this blog, doesn't it? haha). Maybe my godmother made this gift in the hope that my wife would take this book as a motivating moment and so she would start to cook some those dishes for me. By now, all that know me, already can have a good guess how the story ended up? Right, I ended up using it and cook some of those dishes for my wife. She still enjoys the book very much by looking at the pictures and telling me what she would like me to cook for her.


In that book there is a Broccoli parfait that is really delicious but I changed it the broccoli to spinach that i prefer over broccoli anyway (alongside with some other minor modifications) and, long story short, here I would like to present you this dish that I usually serve as a veggie side dish.

Ingredients:

• 1 good kg of spinach (if you use raw spinach buy 1.5 kg fresh spinach)
• 1 carrot diced in big pieces
• 5 eggs
• 250 ml of cream (cream is one of the things that are very hard to get here, so I skip this one most of the time but if you have some, add it, it's really worth it, makes everything just so much better)
• 4 table spoons of grated Swiss cheese (I recommend Emmental or Gruyere)
• Nutmeg
• pepper and salt for seasoning
• butter for greasing.

If you got fresh spinach, just as me, first you got to clean the spinach well as spinach grows on sandy soil and you don't want to have the sandy sensations added to your pallet. Soak the spinach a good 10 - 20 minutes in water. After that you cut of the stem of the spinach and steam it with a little water for a very short time to keep most of the good stuff (Vitamines A and B, Iron, Calcium, Magnesium etc...) inside the plant. Then you take it out and put it in a blender, alongside with all the other ingredients. Now cook the carrot until soft but not too soft and also put it in the blender.
Blend everything together until you got a consistent light green color spinach cream. This is the time that you start to heat the oven at 180 C. In the meantime you grease up some little cupcake forms in which we will make our little spinach cupcakes. Then you pour the spinach cream in the greased forms. This ones, we will put on a bigger ove tray in which we will fill water, so that the cupcake forms will be baking in this water bath. Now we put the waterbath with the forms in the oven and bake the spinach pies for about 60 - 70 minutes. After that, just shake the pies out of the cupcake forms and enjoy the spinach meal :).