If you want to be "strong to the finich" because you eat your spinach, this recipe will do the trick. Epinards a la Mornay, Gratines (Spinach Gratineed With Cheese Sauce) is a great way to eat your vegetables. Spinach cooked with a creamy cheese sauce and baked with cheese on top -- that sounds almost as tasty as the fancy French name!
This was actually pretty simple to make even though it involved four, yes four, different recipes. Julia is great at doing that in her book, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," where she lures you into a simple recipe with only a few lines of instruction and then you discover it links you to another recipe that links you to another recipe and so on. Lucky for me, each of the linked recipes were pretty quick and simple. To make Epinards a la Mornay, Gratines I started with Epinards Blanchis (blanched spinach) which led to Epinards au Jus (spinach blanched in stock) which led to the final spinach recipe. Add to that the recipe for Bechamel sauce which led to Mornay sauce -- I was flipping so many pages during this that it looked like I was in the final exciting chapter of a Clive Cussler novel!
Looking at the final size of the finished dish, it is hard to believe that this started out with 3 pounds of spinach. In case you haven't cooked fresh spinach before, 3 pounds is a big bag, almost the size of the bag that lines our kitchen trash can. The first step was to blanch the spinach for about 2 minutes and then immediately drain and rinse it with cold water to stop the cooking and lock in the beautiful green color. Cooling it off also made it lot easier to do the next step which was smushing the spinach in my hands to squeeze out as much of the water as possible. This always makes it look like I've ended up with clumps of dried grass clippings but it is what it is. The freshly smushed clippings, errrrr, spinach was then roughly chopped to break it down to smaller pieces.
After everything was chopped up it was tossed in a skillet over moderately high heat with a little butter, salt, and pepper for a couple of minutes to evaporate as much of the moisture as possible. Then I lowered the heat and sprinkled on, and mixed in, 1 1/2 tablespoons of flour and continued cooking that for about 2 minutes to cook the flour. Then it was time to add a cup of beef bouillon (the au jus part) and cook for about 15 minutes with the lid on.
As the spinach finished cooking, I prepared my Mornay sauce. I'm not going to write much about it here since I have many times before. This is actually something I'm pretty much able to do consistently without needing to read the recipe word for word. If nothing else I have certainly learned to make a white sauce! Remember, Bechamel is the basic white sauce. Adding cheese to it turns it into Mornay sauce. Because my sweety, Elizabeth, really likes cheese I did end up using a bit more than the 1/2 cup of cheese that would normally be used.
About 1/3 of the sauce was then spread evenly in the bottom of a 9x9 Pyrex baking dish and then all of the spinach was spread on top of the layer of sauce. The rest of the sauce was then spread evenly over the spinach and then about 1/4 cup of grated Swiss cheese was sprinkled over that.
30 minutes in a 375 degree preheated oven was all it took to transform it into a dish full of wonderful creamy and cheesy spinach. When it was done baking I put it under the broiler for just about a minute to just slightly brown the cheese on top. Technically this was a side dish but I think I'd be willing to consider it a dessert. It was that good!
Bon Appetit!
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