Our Overwintered Spinach

That is much more than I thought we had! We'd have had to pay a fortune for organic spinach from the store. Perhaps we have paid a fortune if we are measuring by time taken to grow. We planted in September or October.

It was eaten by bugs, but not too much. Maybe we have found a good way for us to grow spinach in our climate and ecosystem. Bugs (specifically thrips, I think) have destroyed all previous attempts, but overwintering probably handles that problem.

We had this in baked ziti. It probably would've been better nutritionally to base a salad around it, but oh well. Having been overwintered, though, the spinach is nice and old and tough and tastes much better cooked. I would guess that minerals (such as the ever-important iron) hold up well to cooking, whereas vitamins are more likely to break down under cooking. Maybe 20 minutes at 375 won't be too bad for all the wonderful nutritional goodness in spinach.

EDIT: Wow, notice that those nutritional figures are for *boiled* spinach. This will be a most nutritious meal for Harmony and baby. Harmony thinks spinach salads are a relative newcomer, and that before the food industry got into marketing baby spinach, most people had it boiled.

EDIT again: PLUS, our spinach is fresh; picked about 15 minutes before being cooked. So nutrition numbers for our spinach are quite possibly higher than those quoted at World's Healthiest Foods.