spinach egg and mushroom salad

serves 4

What You Need

2 large handfuls of baby spinach or very fresh full-grown spinach
1 cup of raw white button mushrooms, washed and sliced
6 hard-boiled eggs, grated with a coarse grater
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped (optional)
1/2 cup of a vinaigrette dressing
1/4–1/2 teaspoon of red peppercorns, preferably hand-ground with a mortar and pestle (you can use black peppercorns if you don’t have red ones).

Here’s How

Clear out any wilted bits or nasty stalks from the spinach and give it a really good wash, making sure to remove any sand. Spin it dry or dry it in a tea towel and then pop it into the fridge for 15–20 minutes to crisp it up. When you’re ready to serve this salad, place the spinach leaves in a bowl. Add your mushrooms. Sprinkle garlic over the top. Pour over your vinaigrette dressing. Top with grated hard-boiled eggs and sprinkle with coarsely-ground red pepper. Serve immediately.

The combination of spinach with grated hard-boiled eggs and mushrooms is a surprising one. The crunchiness of the spinach is offset by the rich, creamy protein properties of the eggs. There is something very special about topping any salad with hard-boiled eggs that have been roughly grated. I discovered this years ago. It always surprises me that more people don’t know about it. I often grate hard-boiled eggs on a salad to create a rich, whole meal for four people in as little as ten minutes on the table.

This salad travels well, provided that you carry the dressing and the grated hard-boiled eggs in separate containers and add them just before serving.

I buy my spinach as fresh as possible because it actually tastes quite different once it’s sat around for a while. I like to use red peppercorns in this recipe, as I do in many of my recipes, and to hand-grind it using a mortar and pestle. This is the very best way of releasing all of the finest flavor of any peppercorns. Few people these days use red peppercorns, yet they have a completely unique flavor and add such colorful beauty to your dishes.

For generations spinach has been touted as a healthy food. But there’s a big irony here. When I was a kid, we were told to eat our spinach because it was iron-rich – what made Popeye strong. Yet this information came out of a mistake – somebody high up in officialdom in the United States misplaced a decimal point, which multiplied spinach’s iron content by 10. Yet this became the official line. The irony surrounding spinach is that it turns out to be even better for you than when it was believed to be so rich in iron.

In the United States a study of over 1200 people aged 66 or more who ate lots of spinach – as well as other vegetables rich in the carotenoids – had two-thirds fewer deaths from cancer in the five years that followed the study, than those who did not. Spinach is rich in other antioxidants too, such as vitamin C and vitamin E. There is a great deal of evidence to show that both spinach and collard greens reduce age-related macular degeneration to the eyes. Spinach is also rich in potassium and does have a good quantity of iron (although not so much as we thought in the Popeye years). Finally, this leafy green turns out to be rich in folate – a B-complex vitamin that few of us get enough of.