When I was growing up, I thought my dad was a gourmet chef.  Not for his day job, of course.  I hung out in reality enough to know that he spent he days working as a psychiatrist.  But, when he came home in the evenings and on the weekends too, food and cooking were his hobbies, his passion.  I used to tell people all the time that my father was a true gourmet.  Now that I’m all grown up, I realize that while my father enjoyed gourmet food and he was an excellent cook, he was not a gourmet chef, at least not in the traditional sense.  My dad was a master at taking simple ingredients & staples you’re likely to have in your pantry and turning them into delicious meals that flavored my childhood.  This recipe was one of my favorites when I was a little girl and it’s still one of my favorite meals now.  (It is also one of Abigail’s all-time favorite dinners, which, considering one of the main ingredients is spinach, I think is saying a lot .

While my dad may have been a master at cooking, he was not exactly a master at writing down recipes.  My conversations about recipes with him went one of two ways.  The first was “add a little of this, add that to taste, bake in a warm oven….”  The other was he would write down the recipe in excruciating detail and mail it to me.  My sister has his macaroni & cheese recipe.  It is seven hand-written pages, complete with information on which aisle in the store to find each ingredient.  Neither of those methods was actually conducive to quickly & easily cooking a weeknight dinner .  So, as the years have gone by, I’ve started writing up his recipes with ingredients, measurements, and baking instructions.  Partly because I need the ease of a recipe…it’s not the easiest thing in the world to cook with two kids, a dog, and a husband underfoot, so I often need a recipe to work from.  And, I want these written down so that my girls will have them when they learn to cook and head off to start families of their own.

So, here’s the first in my dad’s long list of recipes.

Salmon Florentine

Ingredients

2 10 oz packages of frozen, chopped spinach

1 15 oz can of salmon (pink or red work equally well)

2 tablespoons sherry (my dad always said to use real sherry, not cooking sherry, but I use the cooking variety and it tastes fine to me…of course my palate is not as refined as his was )

2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

2 tablespoons of lemon juice

1 1/2 cups shredded cheddar cheese

3/4 cup to 1 cup of mayonnaise

1/2 teaspoon coarse sea salt

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

1 sleeve of Ritz crackers

2 tablespoons of butter, melted

Instructions

Thaw chopped spinach.  Rinse and drain well (you’ll need to squeeze the spinach to remove the excess moisture)

De-bone salmon and flake with a fork.  After years of doing this, I’ve learned that the bulk of the bones in the can of salmon are in the center, so if you carefully remove the salmon from the can and then split the salmon in half, the bones are a lot easier to find and pull out.

Combine spinach, salmon, sherry, Worcestershire, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and 3/4 cup of mayonnaise in a medium bowl.  Stir until ingredients are well-combined.  If the mixture is not creamy enough, add the additional 1/4 cup of mayonnaise.

Transfer mixture to a casserole dish.

Crush Ritz crackers using a food chopper or a rolling pin and ziplock bag.  Sprinkle Ritz crackers over the top of the salmon mixture.  Pour melted butter over the top of the crackers.  Bake in 350 degree oven for 30-40 minutes until the cracker topping is golden brown and the salmon mixture is bubbly.

Enjoy!