balsamic spinach

This isn't revolutionary but was really good and fast and would be a good side dish or little vegetarian dinner with some steamed green beans and couscous. :) I bought the real spinach leaves that weren't salad bagged. Like near the romaine lettuce. The leaves are bigger than those tiny salad bagged things and much less pricey. The following recipe yielded probably about 1 to 1 and a half cups cooked spinach.

Balsamic Spinach
INGREDIENTS
approx. 3 cups washed and de-stemmed spinach leaves (or however much you want)
1 T. evoo
4 T. pine nuts*
2 cloves garlic, minced
salt, pepper, balsamic vinegar
DIRECTIONS
Heat a large pan, sauce pan or wok on medium high heat. Throw in pine nuts and let sit about a minute or 2, stir and let sit again. I covered them during this time but don't think that's necessary if your pan doesn't have a lid. Pour in olive oil, stir and then lower heat to low-medium (a 3 on my stove). Add garlic and stir. Be sure the heat is the pan is lowered before adding garlic or it will burn quickly. Add spinach in hand fulls and stir each addition about 2 minutes or until nearly wilty before adding each new addition. With a fork or tongs, remove leaves as soon as they turn uniformly dark green. Once all have been cooked and removed, empty remaining pine nuts and garlic onto spinach. Drizzle with balsamic vinegar, approx. three dashes.

*ok pine nuts were hard to find for me in the grocery store. After asking, I was directed to the baking section with the little bags of crushed walnuts etc. I would have made dish earlier if I'd asked someone one of the last 3 times I went to the store and nonchalantly milled around, quasi looking for them.

Toasting the pine nuts like this made my kitchen smell so good and, in my opinion, the balsamic vinegar was the finishing touch. It added a little tangy sweetness to the nuts and heavish spinach. Next time I'll try topping with feta cheese as one of the reviews of the recipes on All Recipes.com from which this is adapted, suggested.

About the couscous. I like it but I just made whole wheat couscous out of the box. I may try it with mushrooms and wine next time but it will have to be on a night like this where I can try froo frooy little entrees when Taylor is otherwise engaged.

For those of you looking forward to my promised pumpkin chocolate chippers here is a recipe you can try. I decided that cookies need butter or shortening to be good cookies. Those fats give them that crispness that pumpkin cookies won't have because the pumpkin, like applesauce in my snickerdoodles, was serving as the 'fat.' While probably healthier, it's not a good cookie in my opinion. SO I'm not wasting my eggs on that. BUT I do want to try this pumpkin cream cheese bake that a girl I work with made for us. So I hope to make that once I get around to buying the ingredients.

Next week I will be making sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving! Monumental. So I plan to document that endeavor.

UPDATE: I made this with sauteed mushrooms. I sliced and sauteed them first and then left them in the pan as I made the spinach. Yummers.