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About this time, spinach bolts, sugar snap plants turn yellow, and tomatoes finally start to show promise. And luckily, even our shady plot is doing the same – a few things refused to come up, but for the most part it has kept my gardening needs and tastebuds fulfilled. It is pretty funny to find a new volunteer sunflower each week – I can only guess the last caretakers loved their sunflowers through the end of the season. They’re tenacious, and take no prisoners when it comes to battling for sunlight. That means most of them have ended up in the compost pile, though I left a couple just for the hell of it.

I should point out, that the cilantro planted at Sam’s request (I completely dislike cilantro) has gone to seed without being used. (Strike that for next year’s plot!) It’s a weird sort of power to be the primary gardener and meal determiner, without having to be the cook. However, I’ll harvest a little coriander (the seeds of the cilantro plant), as they wouldn’t hurt for the occasional recipe that uses the spice.

The tomatoes are starting to turn red, though all the fruits are much smaller than at other plots in the garden. While I am tempted to blame this solely on the lack of sun, neighbors with walls-of-water have tomato plants and fruits of tremendous size. That may need to be a change for next year – Colorado’s shorter growing season requires more gardener intervention of garden conditions.

The shade, however, dominates the plot – meaning that we are getting the most of (and most out of) the greens I planted in huge amounts. We still have plenty of collard greens, but most of the rainbow chard and all of the spinach was recently used in our Spanakopita:

Spanakopita

2 lbs. fresh spinach leaves

½ cup chopped fresh parsley

½ cup chopped fresh dill

2 cups finely chopped green onions

1 ½ tsp. fine grey sea salt

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

3 cups chopped onion

¼ tsp. coarse ground black pepper

½ lb. feta cheese, crumbled (traditionally made from sheeps milk, goat is also good)

14 filo leaves (usually sold frozen, thaw thoroughly!)

¾ cup clarified butter (ghee), melted

1. Wash and clean the spinach. Discard the stems. Drain and cut the leaves into shreds.


2. Combine the spinach, parsley, dill, green onions, and grey sea salt in a bowl. Let stand for 15 minutes, then press out all of the liquid.


3. Heat the extra-virgin olive oil in a skillet and sauté the 3 cups of chopped onions until soft and transparent. Add the spinach mixture from step 2 and sauté for a few more minutes. Add the feta cheese and black pepper.


4. Place each of 7 filo leaves in a buttered 10” x 17” x 2” baking pan, brushing each leaf with melted clarified butter. Add the spinach mixture from step 3, spread into a thick layer then add remaining filo leaves, again brushing each leaf with melted clarified butter. Cut into 3” x 3” pieces with a sharp knife.


5. Bake at 375 degrees for 30 minutes or until golden brown. From greysalt.com

I should note a couple variations on this recipe…for one, we use regular kosher salt – and the washing, tearing, and salting of the greens takes a significant period of time. It’s OK to change the amount of dill, green onion, and use regular butter instead of ghee. However, finding a cooperative filo dough is a challenge. We have yet to find one that works well, although we crudely work with it before it is thoroughly thawed. (It probably would work better if you moved the filo dough to the top shelf of the fridge in the morning, and to the counter at the start of cooking). Be patient with it, and liberal with the butter – it doesn’t want to fold nicely into the dish like you might expect of other doughs.

Through the magic of my clippers and my new left-handed scissors, I successfully turned
this…

into this:

Our visitor decided when I last saw him in April that he wanted a mohawk. Luckily, a drive out to see us gave us the chance to do so. I think he was pretty pleased with the results, as was I.

If you’ve grown up in this state, you know exactly what I’m talking about. But it’s likely that your reaction is different, based on whether you first attended this venue as a child or a parent. Much like St. Louis’s favorite pizza, if you haven’t tried it by age 9, you won’t be impressed. But if you have…oh, the joys of this spot on east Colfax! I have many memories of exploring every nook with my brother, usually arriving after pleading with innocent family visitors to take us there (you know, those visitors who at the end of the trip say, “you’ve shown us such a lovely time, we’d like to take you out to dinner. Where would the children like to go?”). Everything about this place is magical: from the shrieking journey through Black Bart’s Cave, to the hilarious hourly shows featuring the gorilla, his idiot keeper, and the reporter who ALWAYS loses her wig and is pushed into the pool two stories below by the gorilla, to the mining area with sleeping miners, to the crazy helium balloon machine, to the mariachis, to the fire juggling divers to the hourly pinatas to the endless other places to run around while our parents sat at the table and embarrassedly apologized to whichever family visitor we had talked into treating us here, sight unseen.

This all being said, I know lots of people who grew up with this fantastical place and yet feel like it doesn’t hold up to a visit as an adult. I worried about this (as well as memories of the food – terrible – but acceptable to a non-discerning distracted child’s palate). But now we had visitors arriving, complete with a 9-year-old, and no way were we going to disappoint by denying him a visit. And I don’t think it disappointed him, either, since upon repeated questioning, he proudly stated it was the best part of his trip. And it definitely did hold up to an adult visit, mainly because it was almost. the. exact. same.

Seriously, my last visit was easily 16 years ago, and it still had the same look, smell, same sense of the impossible (how does that strip mall location fit seating for over 1,000 and a two-story waterfall all inside??), same cheesy skits, and same scary bits of Black Bart’s Cave. Oh, and same awful food. That being said, any visit by an adult should come requisite with the less-than-normal process of eating a meal an hour or so BEFORE going. Once there, you are required to buy a meal, but simply don’t eat it. Box it up for the pets or something, and only ingest the drinks and sopapillas. You’ll be much happier that way, and you are certain to find cheap, quality Mexican food in the surrounding neighborhood, so this is simpler than it sounds.

It’s amazing that a business that forces its waitstaff to respond with a quick trot to any table that has raised a tiny red flag has remained in business for over 30 years (Sam demonstrates in this picture), but I suppose unlimited trays of sopapillas keep all involved happy. Strangely enough, those of us with strong memories noticed only two changes: the genie in the magic wishing well is far less scary (no, it’s not just that I’m grown up, they really did change it); and the waitstaff has dramatically shifted demographics. As a kid, I remember the staff being full adults, clearly frustrated and rushed, with dark stains under each arm. This time around, all the waitstaff we spoke with were young, hip teens – eager to put a more interesting job on their college applications. This strange shift meant that all of them seemed quite happy, like a self-selecting group of pleasant ironists. This made the biggest significant change easier to deal with: for the first time ever, I had to pay my own way.