Thaw frozen spinach that´s meant to be boiled frozen

1. Let it sit, pray carryover cooking does the job (unlikely)

2. Wrap it in plastic wrap, tightly spin the top to close. Twist 'the tail' into a knot or secure with string. Put it back in the water.

3. Position it 'hole-up' on a baking sheet, put in an oven (time-consuming)

4. Crack the egg over a bowl, finish in a pan on low heat (not ideal for runny yolks)

5. Microwave (sad, but could work)

I vote for number 2.

Judging by the nutrition information I can easily find (for example, from nutritiondata.self.com), frozen spinach is generally cooked by boiling and draining. That's pretty much what I'd have guessed; it's certainly the easy way to cook things.

Unfortunately, that means that some nutrients are lost with the discarded water. I doubt it'd be different for any other green leafy vegetable - though it's certainly much harder to find frozen mustard greens!

The nutrition information for fresh spinach is for fresh, raw spinach; if you boiled and drained it, you'd make the same sacrifice that the frozen spinach has.

As for your generalization, freezing vegetables and fruits does preserve most things pretty well - but only what's actually left in them when they get frozen! And while transporting fresh vegetables around can cost you some "freshness", it's not going to affect minerals. Some vitamins could be lost by breaking down (I'm not an expert here, but it seems possible) since they're more complex molecules, but minerals are just single elements. Those iron atoms won't fall out of the spinach on the way, and they're certainly not going to be transmuted, either!

Edit: Essentially what's been said in the comments is that the USDA nutrition facts say that "Spinach, frozen, chopped or leaf, cooked, boiled, drained" has about half as much iron as "Spinach, cooked, boiled, drained". A discrepancy, indeed, though not the same one cited in the question. My interpretation here is that the frozen spinach is simply not cooked in the same way (boiled and drained more thoroughly) as the non-frozen.

An alternative, proposed by Adisak, is that the frozen spinach nutrition means that you've taken the already-cooked, frozen spinach and boiled it again and drained away even more nutrients. This seems unlikely; frozen spinach is already cooked, so there's no reason for the nutrition information to assume that you'll boil it over again. The description (it seems to me) is referring to the cooking that took place before it was frozen.