October Novel Prep Challenge

Oh, spinach. Let me tell you about spinach.

This meal plan I'm on occasionally gives me spinach salad. Now, I *could* change the meals around, but when I do that, I end up with something involving bacon. Which is fine occasionally, but I shouldn't be eating it every day.

So, spinach. Spinach salad. It's simple: You take spinach and some chopped scallions, a bit of olive oil, and some lemon juice, salt and pepper and boom! Salad. Problem? FIVE CUPS of spinach. FIVE CUPS.

Never mind that I can never figure out exactly what five cups of spinach means. Do you just drop it into a big measuring cup (yes, I have an enormous measuring cup), loosely? Or do you pack it down so there's more spinach in the five cups? If it's loose, do you stop when a stray stem breaks the five-cup line, or do you take like an average of the fractal surface of the mess of spinach?

Yes, there's an alternative where I can measure it in grams. I even have a scale for that sort of thing. I think it was meant for drug dealers; the Amazon reviews were all like "easy to read, fast, easily concealable..." But there's no way to measure five cups of spinach with it (either loose or packed), unless I weigh like three leaves at a time. And then I wouldn't have time to do anything else, like play video games or post here. Besides, by the time I decide to create the salad, I'm about to starve to death.

So? I guess at it. Five decent handfuls of the green crap. Probably about five cups. Maybe more. Maybe less.

And then it takes four to five hours for my stomach to stop complaining. I don't dislike spinach, but my gut bacteria think it's from Mars.

What's even worse, though, is when they ask you to cook a similar amount of spinach. It's like magic, really: Five cups plus heat equals about two teaspoons of slimy green stuff. Where does all that extra volume go? I'm convinced it quantum tunnels to the digestive tract of some vegan somewhere.

Eating healthy is HARD. Especially when I can get a pepperoni pizza from GrubHub in less than 30 minutes, and I know it.