Spinach, Feta, and Reenacting James Bond

You win some. You lose some. This will be the unfortunate theme for today’s recipe.  (Don’t worry, I didn’t burn the house down.)

This week, I elected to make Ina Garten’s spinach with feta and pine nuts. 

2 ½ tablespoons good olive oil

1 ½ cups yellow onion (chopped)

1 pound fresh baby spinach

1 ½ tablespoons toasted pine nuts

½ cup feta (diced)

 1 lemon (1 ½ tablespoons juice)

kosher salt (1 ½ teaspoons)

black pepper (1 teaspoon)

I chose to halve the recipe because a) this type of dish doesn’t keep well and b) I didn’t want to eat 1 lb. of spinach by myself.

First, I heated the olive oil in a sauté pan and added the onion. I cooked the onion over medium heat until it was tender (about 8 to 10 minutes).  Next, I added the lemon juice (about 1 ½ tablespoons if you are making the full recipe) and the spinach.  I used tongs to turn the spinach in the pan until it was slightly wilted.  Then, I topped the spinach with a bit of lemon zest and removed the pan from the heat.

Now, here is where the problem started.  “Frailty, thy name is Salt.”

Ina says to mix in 1 ½ teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon pepper, the Feta cheese, and pine nuts after the pan has been removed from the heat.   I halved these amounts because I was making half the recipe.  Unfortunately, even with half the salt, the dish was too salty.  When I attempted to choke down the final result, I felt like I was reenacting James Bond in Casino Royale after Le Chiffre poisons him and he is forced to drink salt to vomit…  It was that bad.  Way too much salt!!

This recipe is good in theory—it is very simple to make and the lemon is a nice touch–however, the proportions for the ingredients are a bit off. I suggest starting out with ½ teaspoon of salt in your dish and going from there.  Don’t forget that Feta in itself is quite salty!

I hope you all have better luck than I did with this recipe. If you manage to get the proportions correct, let me know!  I will try to make this one again in the future—but with less salt.

Love you, Ina. This time, it just didn’t work out.