What to do with the rest of a bag of spinach
Spinach is sold in 200g bags. A recipe asks for two handfuls. A handful is somewhere around 30 to 40 grams, so two of them is well under half the bag — and the rest sits in the drawer turning to slime by Thursday.
How long it actually keeps
Three or four days from opening, kept cold, and less if it is already damp. Two things extend it: do not wash it until you are using it, and put a folded sheet of kitchen paper in the bag to take up the moisture the leaves give off. Spinach rots from wet, not from age.
Five things to do with the rest
Wilt it into pasta at the very end
Two handfuls thrown into the pan in the last minute, off the heat, with whatever sauce is already there. It collapses to almost nothing, so use more than looks sensible.
Put it in eggs
Scrambled, an omelette, a frittata, or eggs baked into a tomato sauce. Wilt it first and squeeze the water out, or the eggs go watery.
Stir it through a curry or a dal
Again at the end, with the heat off. A handful per portion disappears into the sauce and nobody has to eat a bowl of leaves.
Drop it into noodle soup
Straight into the hot broth in the bowl. It wilts on the way to the table.
Freeze what is left
Wilt it, squeeze it dry, and freeze it in a bag pressed flat. It is no good for salad afterwards, but it is perfectly good for anything cooked.
What not to do
Do not buy the bag intending to have salad twice. Bagged spinach is picked young and wilts fast, and the second salad is nearly always the one that gets thrown away. Plan the raw use first and cook the rest.
The better fix is not buying it twice
All of the above is damage limitation. The actual problem is that the pack was bought for one meal and nothing else in the week was planned around it.
That is what MealPlans4One does. It puts the rest of the pack into other dinners and says so on the ingredient itself. From a real plan:
2 large handfuls Baby spinach
Buy a 200g bag; you will use it again in meals 3, 7 and 11.
One bag, four dinners, nothing left to throw out. The same applies to the half tin, the bunch of coriander and the pack of six chicken thighs.
14 dinners for £19. First one free, on screen, before you decide.