Lockdown Edition Week 3: Spinach and Mushroom Salad

The book: The Silver Spoon

The recipe: p585, "Spinach and Mushroom Salad"

Ah, The Silver Spoon. The queen of Italian cookbooks. Nearly 1,500 pages long and practically overflowing with classic Italian cuisine - hearty pasta, meat and fish dishes, decadent cheesy risottos, giant vol-au-vents, live spiny lobsters, it's all in there.

So of course the random number generator gives us a fricking spinach and mushroom salad.

Now, be honest, you've been waiting for this. Outright kitchen disasters are one thing, but part of the appeal of the original Random Kitchen lay in me having to dredge up a thousand words about something so mundane it barely even qualified as a recipe. If that's your particular strand of fandom, then this is your lucky week.

In fairness, I am at least a bit intrigued by this "recipe", since spinach and mushroom don't strike me as an obvious combination to be eaten raw. Sautéed and stirred through a big pan of penne, absolutely, but I'm not imagining them having the nicest texture in the world in salad form. So without further ado, let's find out!

The prep: There really isn't much ado involved at all this week, as it happens - the ingredient list stretches to a whole six lines, two of which are olive oil and seasoning.

I am at least required to make a minor decision on the spinach front. This particular recipe simply calls for 300 grams of "spinach", but an adjacent recipe for a spinach and scallop salad (that sounds like real food why can't we have that instead please) specifies "young spinach leaves, tough stalks removed". Properly big, farmer's-market spinach leaves do feel like they would be too chunky for a simple salad, so a bag of Asda's finest* organic baby spinach gets the nod. Other than that, I pick up a lemon, some pine nuts and the titular mushrooms, and that's that.

And yes, I really do go through a whole bag of spinach leaves - baby spinach leaves, no less - and remove (most of) the more prominent stalks. This is lockdown, folks, you have to take your entertainment wherever you can get it. At least now I understand why the recipe claims a preparation time of 25 minutes for a mere salad. It's not lying.

The making: The mushrooms are thinly sliced, placed in a salad bowl and sprinkled with some of the juice from the lemon. Right from the moment I read the recipe, I've been concerned about the relative quantities involved - there's a lot of spinach and not much of anything else - and nothing I'm seeing so far indicates that this interpretation is wrong...

Lemony mushroom base

Anyway, a buttload of spinach and a handful of pine nuts are added to the lemony mushrooms, then I whizz together the rest of the lemon juice with a healthy slosh of olive oil and some salt and pepper. This dressing is then used to - you guessed it - dress the salad.

A little like with last week's breadcrumbs that refused to stick to some basil leaves because that's how the laws of physics work, diligently tossing this salad isn't going to make it look any less like isolated mushroom slices marooned in a sea of spinach, so here you go, we're done:

Yeah.

The eating: In fairness, this obviously isn't meant as anything more than a side salad to a main meal, or even one of lots of dishes on a table full of goodies, so it would be unfair to expect it to be particularly fascinating.

We do at least endeavour to treat it as a (slightly sad-looking) lunch in its own right, though:

And hey - it's actually quite nice! The acidity of the lemon juice softens the mushrooms a bit without making them slippery and unpleasant, and the spinach leaves, while proportionally dominant, allow you to get a proper forkful of food each time you go in. The flavours are all good, and there's a chewiness and volume to it all that I wasn't really expecting from the kind of ingredients you'd normally use as an excuse to classify a vat of pasta and parmesan as a "healthy dinner".

Nevertheless, if this is going to be remotely substantial enough to keep us going until teatime (well, until our mid-afternoon chocolate break), there's only one thing for it - it's time to call in the reinforcements...

I've never been so happy to see you guys

These duly added, what results is a decently substantial and flavourful lunch that we're both perfectly happy with. It's a cheat, of course - almost everything in life is improved by the addition of cheese, and we're meant to be judging the actual recipe here. But still, it's good to know that the (to me) seemingly unlikely combination of spinach and mushrooms works really nicely as the base for a salad with relatively little preparation involved. (Other than all that stalk removal, of course - but you could get away without that if you're not too fussed about how it looks.)

Plus you can do what The Silver Spoon does - supplement the dish with its Italian name, namely insalata di spinaci e funghi, and kid yourself into thinking you're getting something far more exotic. Just don't look elsewhere on the double-page spread that houses this particular recipe, or you might shed a quiet tear at the cruelty of the random gods.

Two-word verdict: Surprisingly okay.