I've found over the years I'm challenged by having to incorporate ingredients like sauerkraut and by the need to keep bitter products like spinach in its pristine state rather than cooking them to death.

Bitter foods are peerless at resolving stomach problems and spinach of course makes you strong. Even a cartoon figure like Popeye knew that.

Trouble is most cuisine is based on cooking the bitterness out or selecting spinach that is less bitter - or of course adding butter to give it a sweet glow.
So how to get it into raw foods? Pesto.

To make pesto with Spinach you need:

    * About a dozen leaves of baby spinach (use one with a peppery flavour or substitute sorrel which also works really well)
    * 4 tbs olive oil
    * A cup of fresh basil leaves
    * 100 gms of pine nuts
    * The juice of one lemon
    * Half a cup of parsley with a few leaves of mint
    * Black pepper
    * Tagliatelle or soba or buckwheat pasta for four.

Note there is no garlic in this recipe.

Pesto is basically a combo dish so you need to combine those ingredients.

The only proviso I make is if you are using basil from your own garden or pots, and parsley and mint also from the garden, begin by putting them in a large bowl.

Wash with water and soak briefly in a dilution of water and vinegar - just a couple of caps of vinegar per litre of water

Alternatively don't soak - wash them and then add the juice of a lemon and let them stand briefly in the juice (it has a very low pH and will kill parasites).

Soak/wash the spinach and add it to the herbs. Add in the pine nuts, olive oil and black pepper.

Either use a hand blender or electrical blender to crush and mix the ingredients.