By Lauren Burnham

Spinach poppers. Delicious lumps of rice and spinach, bound together by melted cheese, with spices to add flavor and aroma. The spinach popper, homemade and home loved.

Spinach has been one of the most hated enemies of toddlers and children every for ages. Many kids would rather paint the walls green than actually put the stuff in their mouths.

But this is no ordinary spinach dish. These are poppers.

poppers recipe (click it!)

See that? That is the magnificent recipe my mother uses to make them. She tells me she uses brown rice and 1 teaspoon of Italian herbs, so do with that what you will.

I’ve been eating Poppers for a very long time, before I even knew what spinach was, and that kids my age were supposed to hate it. I was a weird kid; I hated spaghetti instead.

Poppers are a comfort food. Despite the spinach and rice and healthy stuff they’re made out of, they look like fried awesomeness and taste like mini lumps of hot heaven.

First you’ve got the spinach, which is mixed up with the rice. Combined, they turn crunchy on the outside, and if you’re lucky, gooey with mozzarella cheese on the inside. I like the crunchy parts the best; it’s like getting the lucky piece of bacon that got cooked just right.

The Italian herbs and the cheeses are what really makes it a comfort food. The cheese, obviously, binds everything together. It also gives it a fried goody taste, because of the way it cooks with the rice and spinach. The Italian herbs give it flavor, more so than the other main ingredients, making it sort of pop in your mouth.

If you end up cooking this delightful dish, try to eat it right out of the oven, heat be damned, because these suckers taste best fresh, so get them while they’re hot!