Yesterday, I had a bunch of spinach that I needed to use up. I decided that the best way to use it was to use it to make bread. I did a bunch of internet searching for a quick bread recipe because yeast bread isn’t really my forte. I ended up deciding to make a Caramelized Onion and Spinach Bread. The most challenging part of this recipe was caramelizing the onions and cooking down the spinach. The onion take a while to cook and the spinach can only be added AFTER the onions are caramelized. Otherwise, the onions don’t caramelize. Additionally, the cooked spinach has a lot of liquid which gets added to the mixture. This makes the resulting bread kind of sticky. I cooked my bread an extra 10 minutes to ensure it was done. My toothpick came out “clean” so the bread was done. The texture was still a little sticky for my liking. So next time I’m likely to put less of the liquid from cooking the spinach down, in the mixture. Alternatively a bit more flour might make the texture to my liking. Another challenge with the bread being sticky is that it adheres to the baking pan and was a little difficult to get out of the pan whole. I used cooking spray with flour to coat the pan. However, flouring the pan using the standard method probably would have been a better idea.
The best part about this recipe was its simplicity. The ingredients are just measured and combined. There aren’t any complex preparation techniques. The onion and spinach can be prepare ahead of time. All of this made this recipe quite friendly for my three year old son to help me with the bread. He hasn’t mastered the motor control for stirring with a spoons, so we used my stand mixer to blend all the ingredients together. By using the stand mixer my son was able to easily add the ingredients, one at a time and combine them. He like a thin slice of the bread cut and toasted with butter. Probably because it makes it a little bit more crusty/crunchy. Maybe next time I’ll brave making a yeast bread since my son prefers crusty bread.