We all know that we should eat more spinach in our daily diets. The most common way to eat spinach is in a salad but how much salad can you even eat in a single day? Not very much. Here some easy ways to add more spinach to your every day meals.

Five ways to eat more spinach

1. Add it smoothies

Compared to kale or collard greens, Spinach is a soft, less fibrous green that can add creaminess to any smoothie. Add spinach to the blender before adding fruit for an easy to way to eat spinach. Blend a cup of spinach, a frozen banana, 1/2 cup of greek yogurt, 1/2 cup of water, 1 tablespoon of peanut butter, and some ice for a well rounded breakfast smoothie that will take 5 minutes to make and wake you up.

2. Replace less nutritious foods.

Spinach is highly nutritious. 1 cup of spinach can meet your daily requirement of Vitamin K and A and provides a significant amount of iron, Vitamin B, manganese, magnesium, and folate. So how to get more without eating more food? Replace iceberg lettuce in salads and sandwiches with spinach. A lot of other high value greens are tougher to eat raw, but spinach has a naturally creamy flavor that makes it an easy substitute to any raw or cold dish.

3. Saute with olive oil and minced garlic

Spinach offers a lot of nutrition raw, but cooking it makes its vitamins and minerals more available for absorption by your body. Raw spinach has oxalic acid which can block the absorption of calcium and iron. Cooking spinach deactivates much of this oxalic acid and your body is able to absorb more of the Vitamin A and E, zinc, iron, thiamin, carotenoids and more.

Saute spinach with a little olive oil and grapeseed oil until the spinach wilts. You can actually eat a lot of spinach this way because cooked spinach wilts to about 1/3 of its raw size, so a cup of cooked spinach can equal 2 or 3 cups.

4. Add it to soups, casseroles, and any baked or slowly cooked foods

Since spinach is such a powerhouse of nutrition when cooked, you can take advantage and add it to any food that is going to be baked or slowly cooked like a soup. You can even blend the spinach into a soup with an immersion blender to make it creamy.

5. Make Indian Saag

I don’t know of a recipe that includes more spinach per serving than Saag, which is an Indian slow cooked spinach soup. If you have a hard time with plain soups or raw spinach, this is a hearty and flavorful dish that makes it incredibly easy to eat several cups of spinach in 1 meal. You may have eaten Saag Paneer at an Indian restaurant, but its not difficult to make at home.

Recipe: Peel and dice a medium onion, 2 cloves garlic, and a tablespoon of ginger. Heat oil in a pan at medium heat and add 1 tsp of cumin seeds and cook until lightly toasted. Add onion until, then add ginger, garlic, 1 tsp of turmeric and 2 tsp of Indian garam masala. Dice a tomato and add to the mix. Add 4 cups of frozen or fresh spinach and cook for 4-5 minutes, then reduce to low temperature cooking for another 5 mins. Season and serve. There are also a ton of other recipes and variations available online.