We recently had some lovely baby bok choy in our organic produce delivery from Absolute Organics. Usually, I stir fry bok choy, but on this particular evening, I just wasn’t in the mood for an Asian-style preparation. I turned to epicurious.com, a recipe website that I’ve been using for about 15 years. These days, I rarely follow epicurious recipes exactly, but they do give me ideas about how to use our seasonal produce.
A quick search on epicurious.com revealed 73 recipes for bok choy, and guess what? Seventy-one of the recipes were for Asian preparations! The two recipes that were not Asian weren’t very inspiring and weren’t highly rated by those who had cooked them. I hadn’t realized that a non-Asian perspective would be such a tall order to fill or that I’d be on my own in this pursuit!
I had some fabulous ricotta cheese that I needed to use, so I decided to make an Italian-inspired take on creamed spinach, by chopping & sauteing the bok choy with garlic and onions and then baking with the ricotta cheese and a pinch of fresh nutmeg in lieu of a cream sauce.
I liked the end result quite a bit. The bok choy was tender with no trace of the bitterness that sometimes accompanies greens, and it melded nicely with the cheese and nutmeg. That said, it was not particularly appreciated by my dining companions.
Oh well! As in the popular adaptation of Abraham Lincoln’s words,
