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Not just for Popeye

The Blazing Chef attempts to rehabilitate spinach

November 9th, 2005 issue

A glazing for this stuffed turkey dish is just one of the many creative uses for spinach.

From the chef: Lenka Pozárová

For the second volume of my cookbook series, I decided to focus on spinach. Why? Because I think spinach needs to improve its reputation with the Czech public, just like pumpkin, the topic of my first book. While almost no one likes pumpkin, the public is seemingly divided into two camps with respect to spinach. One side loves it beyond any discussion, the other suffers from unpleasant memories of the way it was served in school cafeterias and can't stand "that yucky green substance."

Forget your childhood traumas and get a healing cure with a new spinach recipe: The taste and look of these yummies are light-years away from your bad childhood memories! You only know spinach as a side dish? You won't cease to wonder about all the tricks and magic you can make out of it: crispy fresh salads, creamy soups, filled potato dumplings, pastry fillings or spinach-glazed turkey stuffed with plums.

Any of these recipes could be a good choice, but plum-stuffed turkey with spinach glazing is an absolute delight. Various tastes blend into a unique combination; the taste of spiced turkey meat is balanced by sweet plums and crispy almonds, and to top it all comes the cinnamon spinach. This dish not only tastes good, it also looks good.

Do you find this kind of combination a bit off the wall? Just try it. You don't have to be a pro chef to get great results. And if you still think the rolls are too complicated, just cut the meat into strips and stew it with the spinach, plums and almonds. There's nothing hard about this one.

A couple of tips: If you don't have fresh plums, dried ones will do just as well. Fresh spinach is available in big supermarkets and hypermarkets in larger cities all year round. If you're not lucky enough to get it, you can substitute frozen leaf spinach.

A former tax adviser, Lenka Pozárová is the author of the Zapálená kucharka cookbook series. The first two books deal with pumpkin and spinach recipes and are available in health food stores, Hypernova and Globus or at www.zapalena-kucharka.cz

Plum-stuffed turkey glazed with spinach, cinnamon and almonds

Serves four

Preparation time: 30 minutes

Ingredients

  • 4 turkey breasts (180 grams / about 6.5 ounces each)

  • 500 grams fresh spinach

  • 12 fresh plums

  • 50 grams blanched whole almonds

  • 1 large onion

  • 2 teaspoons cinnamon

  • Salt and pepper to taste

  • Oil

Preparation

  • Wash the spinach thoroughly and dry. Pound the turkey meat into thin cutlets, salt, and lay a few spinach leaves on top of each of them.

  • Insert almonds into eight of the plums (after removing the pits). Take two stuffed plums at a time and lay them next to each other on a cutlet; roll the meat and then firmly wrap kitchen thread around it.

  • Brown the chopped onion in the oil, add 1 teaspoon cinnamon, then add the meat to the pan and grill covered for about 15 minutes. Turn the meat from time to time so that it cooks evenly. Remove the meat and put the rest of the spinach, the remaining chopped plums, almonds and remaining teaspoon of cinnamon into the pan. Add salt to taste and steam the mixture for three to five minutes.

  • Cut the threads from the meat, put each piece on a plate and pour the spinach mixture over it. Serve with rice.

Tip: If you don't have fresh plums, try using dried ones. And if you don't want to do the rolls, you can simply cut the meat into thin strips and cook them with the plums and spinach.

Vegetarian variation: Leave out the meat and add more spinach, almonds, plums and spices.


Other articles in Night & Day (9/11/2005):

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