Cooked Spinach Salad
Raw spinach salad can be delicious, but, in my opinion, a brief cooking—really just a dip in boiling water—brings out the vegetable’s best qualities. Use really young, tender spinach for this salad. It’s easy to find baby spinach in plastic packs these days, but whenever you can—especially in springtime—buy clusters of tender leaves with tiny reddish stems joined at the roots, as they were plucked from the earth. Trim only the hairy tip of the roots, and cook the leaves and stems still together. Make sure you wash them several times, since dirt lodges between the stems.