Swiss Chard is one of my favorite vegetables. Half leafy green and half fibrous crunch, it has a multitude of uses. I particularly like to saute the stems with carrots, onions and carrots when I'm making soup and then stir the shredded greens into broth just before serving. It's a great veggie for beginning gardeners, because it grows abundantly, giving you a whole lot of return on a small amount of investment. It's also a very lovely looking veggie, a feature demonstrated by the picture you see up there.
This Saturday, I was struck by the gorgeous vibrant red roots and shiny green leaves of the Swiss chard being sold at the farmer's market in Grand Army Plaza, in Brooklyn. Surprisingly, I never cooked Swiss chard before. Nevertheless, I left the market determined to eat some. When I got home, I steamed the chard and served it with butter and grey sea salt. The aroma from the kitchen made me feel as though I was lying outside on the ground of a vegetable garden.
For some reason, I thought that spinach and chard were so similar that it did not make a difference which one I'd choose to cook. Interestingly, by the nineteenth century, seed catalog publishers used the word Swiss to distinguish chard from French spinach varieties. If the chard is fresh and young, it can be eaten raw in salads. Since mature chard leaves and stalks become increasingly bitter, they're typically cooked or sauteed so that the bitterness fades.
After a four-and-a-half month hiatus, Slashfood in the Kitchen is back! (I'm sure that you have leaped out of your seat and are cheering upon reading this). This time Scott and I make a quick weeknight dinner that is easy to throw together, tastes pretty darn good and is relatively healthy to boot. We start out with an easy pasta dish much like the ones so many of us grew up eating (pasta, bell peppers, onions, ground beef and tomatoes) and finish things off with some sauteed Swiss Chard (one of the quickest cooking veggies around). Best part of it was that it made enough for two nights' worth of dinner (if you have more than two people in your household, your mileage will vary).
We'd like to thank Mastercard for sponsoring Slashfood in the Kitchen. They'd like us to remind you that whether you're an art-lover, a traveler, or a connoisseur of fine dining, search and you could win priceless prizes beyond compare.
And, if you missed them, you should check out the first two episodes we made last fall. You know you want to learn to roast brussels sprouts and make apple sauce!
Today's featured cookbook, Simply in Season by Mary Beth Lind and Cathleen Hockman-Wert, is one that I mentioned several months ago here on Slashfood, but I like it so much that I thought it deserved a second mention. I pulled it off my shelf a couple of days ago, because I've been in something of a cooking funk lately and thought it might help to inspire me. I find that without the abundance of the farmers market, I have a hard time finding new things to cook. I've been rotating between pots of soup and loaves of bread for weeks now, without much variation. I thought that reading some new recipes, geared towards the quite austerity of the winter, might help me at least alter the variety of soups I'm making (I switch between carrot based soups and chicken with veggies and rice).
And inspire me it did. I'm excited to try out the recipe for Maple Parsnip Soup as well as the Shredded Beet Salad (it's amazing to me how just changing the way you cut a vegetable can change the way your taste buds experience it). Over the weekend, I'm planning to make Bounty Rice, which is a sort of deconstructed stuffed cabbage, spiced with oregano and basil. You can find the recipe after the jump.
This last weekend, I drove down to Washington, DC to visit a good friend who moved there from Philly in July. After I had had the opportunity to admire her adorable apartment and fantastic neighborhood, we hopped into my car and headed for the Maryland suburbs to hit several locations of the Value Village thriftstore chain.
In addition to picking up a new set of measuring cups for $1.20 (the 1/3 cup measure is missing it's handle) and a set of measuring spoons for $.80 (they looked as if they'd never once had the opportunity to measure anything) I acquired six new cookbooks. A couple are old Sunset guides to entertaining or casseroles (don't worry, I plan on sharing some of the good recipes with you all) but one seems to be especially worth the two bucks I paid for it.
It's call Simply in Season and is a collection of recipes (primarily vegetarian) that are organized by season. It's put together by the Mennonite Central Committee, the same folks who brought us the More with Less cookbook (another terrific cooking resource that I've used many times over the years). One recipe from the book that jumped out at me is for a Chard Cheese Bake. Chard is one of those plants that continues to give, making it a favorite of home gardeners and CSA farmers alike. It can be gotten cheaply at grocery stores and farmers markets and doesn't cook down to nothing the way that spinach does. This recipe is sort of like an easy quiche without a crust and I imagine that this would be equally good in the morning for breakfast or as a dinner side dish. The recipe is after the jump.
If yesterday's post on canning piqued your interest in food preservation, then you might want to check out this post over at Farm to Philly. Nicole took some of the Daikon radish that came in her CSA box, mixed it with ginger, garlic, Korean ground chile paste, salt, sugar and Swiss Chard and turned it into Kimchi. She skips out on the step in which you bury the jars underground for the Winter and instead just tucks them into a cool, dark place until the fermentation process is complete.
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