Creamy Spinach

I spent pretty much the entire day working on my econ take home midterm this Sunday. The afternoon went something like this: Study, Coffee, Study, Pizza, Study, Chocolate, Study, Bacardi. By the time I got home at 10 I was beat but craving vegetables and desperate to take my mind off of topics like "the value of Honduran exports to Brazil" so I decided to cook some Spinach.

A few weeks ago I came across a post on a blog that I cannot recall at the moment for creamed spinach, the traditional way, with lots of heavy cream. It looked great but I wondered if there was something I could do to create a creamy spinach dish without so much effort (and so many calories!) and at 10 o'clock on a Sunday night the inspiration (or it might have been desperation) hit.

I washed and and roughly chopped a big bowl of spinach, around half of one of those grocery store packages, then I smashed a garlic clove to get out some econ aggression and flavor the spinach. I put the garlic and about a teaspoon of olive oil in a non-stick skillet over medium heat and cooked it just until the garlic turned pale gold. I added the spinach to the skillet and let it wilt and then (this is the exciting part) I added grated Parmesan and a bit of cream cheese along with a few grates of nutmeg and gave it all a mix.

The result: deliciousness. The spinach retained a bit of texture as it had only been cooked briefly, the Parmesan added major flavor and the cream cheese provided the hit of creaminess I had been craving. Even Zach thought it was pretty good. An added bonus- it only took about 10 minutes to make. This one will definitely be making a reappearance.