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Project number two for operation No Good Thing Goes To Waste: What to do with all of the spinach and herbs. I had a crazy big bag of spinach. Oh, it cooks down so much. Oh, I’ll have lots of salads this week. Oh, I’ll use it on sandwiches instead of lettuce and it’s so good with eggs. All lies I told myself while I was buying such a lot. Partially I did have good intentions. And partially, it’s a general lack of leafy greens in this never ending Winter that seduced me into overbuying. But by the end of the week, I had made exactly one salad and sprinkled some on pizza, and, um, that was it. Plus I had a bunch each of parsley and cilantro. All were still edible but headed towards deeply wilted. So no salads. Pistou it was.
Pistou is the French version of pesto — in the dialect of Provence, pistou means “pounded.” Typically it added to a lush vegetable-rich soup and it traditionally is made with basil, garlic, salt, and olive oil. Some recipes call for chopped tomatoes, some do add cheese, but they aren’t required. When I’ve had it in France, the texture has ranged from a drizzly liquid to a thick, smooth paste. What makes it so valuable in the no waste kitchen, is that unlike pesto, it doesn’t require pine nuts or Parmesan. So if you have the greens, the remaining ingredients to make it are nearly always at hand, and it’s super economical — and delicious — way to salvage excess greens and preserve them for another day.
I took 4 cloves of garlic, peeled them and then crushed them on my cutting board with the side of my chef’s knife. With a fork, I mashed about a teaspoon of kosher salt into the smashed garlic and then put it into the food processor with most of a bunch of parsley, most of a bunch of cilantro, and nearly a pound of spinach. The texture thing is a personal preference. I start blitzing the greens with just a quick glug of olive oil, and then keep adding until the pistou is as thick or runny as I like. When it’s done, the pistou is great to drizzle into soups, over chicken or fish, tossed with potatoes, spooned over scrambled eggs, or used as a pasta sauce.
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