Warm gooey cheese with spinach and garlic.......heaven. This is a great base recipe that can be used for a dip for a variety of things like tortilla chips, vegetables, or great crusty breads. It can also be thinned with the addition of more milk and used as a bechamel for lasagna or even thinned a bit more and uses as an alfredo sauce. The amounts I'm using here will make an appetizer quantity great for sharing with a few friends. Very versatile you can size up or down as you need. Forgive my novice photography, but I'll do my best to get photos to walk through the recipe even if they're not professional quality. Lighting struggles are real folks. Now let's get the prep work out of the way.
Beautiful spinach from a local organic farmer, the leaves are a bit on the bigger side so my personal preference is to go ahead and remove that rib. Just turn the leaf over and pull gently on the stem and it should come right off. If you want to leave it on by all means do, but I would take an extra few seconds and chop the leaves a bit if you did. The lower picture shows a leaf with rib removed so you know what I'm talking about.
This is a leek, use them. If you're not a big fan of an overpowering onion flavor embrace the leek. Leeks have a wonderfully mild onion flavor that I just adore. Leeks do however tend to harbor quite a bit of dirt so taking the time to adequately prep and clean them is a must unless you just happen to enjoy eating dirt. Hey who am I to judge.
Trim your ends off, the dark ends are too fibrous to consume but do make an excellent addition to your compost although you may want to chop or cut them up with a pair of scissors to help them break down faster. Or you can pop them into your stock pot if you're making your own stock. After you half them length wise as this exposes the center layers where soil likes to hide go ahead and give them a chop. Doesn't have to be too fancy, they'll shrink down a bit when you saute them.
I toss the spinach and leaks into my salad spinner, give them a good soak with a splash of vinegar or your go to produce wash and then spin all the excess water away.
Garlic is amazing. Go ahead and chop up a clove or three as your taste preference. Even with three fresh cloves added the flavors are bold enough to withstand the garlic so you won't feel like you're on a mission to repel vampires after all is said and done.
Cheese. 1/4 cup of parmesan and 1/4 cup of asiago are my general go to. But you can substitute your favorite cheese in, today I went with asiago and baby swiss just to give it a try and yum. Just make sure that you have at least one cheese with a strong flavor and one that gives you a good melt (parmesan usually doesn't lend that creamy texture that asiago or other cheeses do).
Into the pan melt 2 tbsp of butter and dump the spinach, leeks, garlic in. Continue to cook over medium heat until the spinach has fully wilted and the leeks are beginning to be translucent. You don't want to brown anything and if you see that any of your items are starting to brown make sure you turn that heat down and even take the pan away from the heat to let it cool, burnt garlic is no good.
Spinach is wilted, leeks are looking good, in goes 1/8 of a cup of all purpose flour. Stir it around mix it in good and let some of that raw flour taste cook out of it. You do not need to bring any color to the flour, a minute or so is plenty here.
In goes the milk, I used about a cup of whole milk. continue stirring the mix until the mix thickens.
This is what you're looking for. Now remove your pan from the heat and then we're going to add the cheese.
Stir in the cheese, again off the heat because hopefully by now you remembered to turn the stove burner off......and serve.
Please note that I try not to over salt my foods. You can add a little salt and pepper at the end but make sure to do this after you add your cheeses because depending upon the salt content of your cheese you may or may not need to. I like to top mine with a little freshly cracked black pepper. It was so hard to resist digging into this before capturing the final picture.
Ingredients:
1 large bunch of spinach
1 leek
3 cloves garlic
2 tbsp butter
1/8 cup all purpose flour
1 cup milk
1/4 cup parmesan cheese
1/4 cup asiago cheese
Directions:
Follow the instructions listed above!
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