The jewel in the garden: red chard

Swiss chard are the only vegetables that have the same color P-O-W as flowers. I just love the brilliance of red chard.

Our chard was a slow starter. While the cauliflowers and Brussels sprouts jumped up from the ground, the chard barely grew for the longest time. Now we're nearing harvest and the question is what can we do with it?

I get stymied about how to fix it. I just found a wonderful sounding "New York Times Cooking" recipe for Swiss Chard Slab Pie. Essentially, it's two layers of dough with a chard, onion, white wine and sour cream layer between. The edges are crimped, the top slitted and washed with egg whites, then baked for 50 to 55 minutes.

I suspect that the filling could be made and served without being tucked into the crust. Here's the filling recipe:

Ingredients:
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 large red onion, finely chopped
4 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
Kosher salt to taste
1 tablespoon ground coriander
1 tablespoon ground ginger
Pinch of red pepper flakes
3 pounds of red Swiss chard, stems separated and cut into 1/4-inch pieces and leaves roughly chopped
1/2 cup dry white wine
3/4 cup sour cream
Black pepper to taste
1 egg beaten with 1 tablespoon of water

In a pot, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the onion, garlic and a generous pinch of salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, until just softened, about five minutes. Add the coriander, ginger and red pepper flakes. Add the chard stems and cook until just softened, about six minutes.

Stir in the chard leaves in large handfuls, letting them wilt before adding more. Add wine, reduce heat to medium, and cook until the leaves are tender and the liquid has evaporated, about 15 minutes. Transfer to a colander to cool completely and drain. When cool, mix chard with sour cream and season with salt and pepper.

At this stage, you could enclose it in dough or a pie crust or phyllo. But I think if it were warmed up slightly, you could serve it without the dough.

Comments

Know Your Soil For Best Garden Results

I've always taken soil for granted. It was there. You put seeds into it. You put water on it. Plants grow and produce flowers, fruit or vegetables. Gayle Weinstein, author of Xeriscape Handbook; A How-To Guide to Natural, Resource-Wise Gardening , takes a different view: “Soil . . . acts as a highway between life and death, land and atmosphere, plants and animals.” It stores water, air and nutrients and makes it possible for an exchange of elements and chemical reactions to occur, she adds. She describes soil as being animal, vegetable and mineral combined. Here are six tests Gayle recommends for getting to know your soil. Grab a shovel and a quart jar. Dig up two cups of dry soil two-to-six inches deep from the areas you want to test. Gather a glass of water, dish washing detergent and paper towels. A soil pH kit, a meter or litmus paper will be needed for the final test.

Hand-Knit Trellis Now Ready for Climbing Foot-Long Beans

Just as the "June" gloom is starting to burn off, I finished my knitted trellis for the garden. It completely surrounds one of our bamboo tripods, with space at the bottom for tending the romaine lettuces growing within the tripod. It's knit out of nylon twine on US 35 needles. While the nylon has no stretch (the way a wool yarn does), the huge gauge has loads of give. The piece was knit flat with ties attached along one edge. It is tied to the tripod along one leg. One some early samples for a knitted plant trellis, I experimented with lace patterns. They look lovely, but I realized two things. One, once the plants grow up the trellis any knitting pattern is lost. Secondly, the plants and leaves need space to grow in and out of. I used a pattern for a shawl: k1, yo, k2tog and then repeat. I got lost a number of times: the yarn-overs drifted over other stitches on occasion. As this was a speed project that won't be visible ones the beans grow over it, I didn...

Water saving ollas

When you're saving water, the first step is to get the water where it's needed in the most direct way possible. No sprinkler heads rising like swans in a ballet to spew water 18-inches above the ground, splashing sidewalks and gutters. No sprinklers nodding back and forth sending sprays of water as tall as a child. Nope, it's irrigation dripping directly at the base of a stem or water bubbling at dirt-level. You can't get much more direct than an olla (pronounced oy-ya ). In the irrigation world, an olla is a clay pot, usually with a round bottom and a longish thin neck that is planted in the dirt next to plants that need water. The dirt is mounded around the pot so that only the end of the neck shows. Water is poured into the opening to fill the buried pot. The clay absorbs water that in turn is absorbed by the dry earth surrounding it. The plant gets a slow steady supply of water. Because the pot is buried, there's little exposure to the air and evaporatio...

The Fink Farm Dirt

Search This Blog