I’m a salad person. I love to eat a salad with my lunch, especially when it’s made with various leafy green vegetables and seasoned with pumpkin seed and a bit of vinegar. It’s therefore not surpring that chard is one of my favorite salad greens. It’s young, tender earthy-tasting leaves always make my meal even more delicious!
Up until recently, my wife and I had only been enjoying chard raw in salads, while it’s leaves were still small and delicate. And once plants matured and their leaves became bigger, sturdier and bitter, we sort of abandoned them and no longer harvested them…
Then something happened and it changed the way we look at and use the chard in our lives…
Towards the end of september, the weather became colder. We had our first autumn frost and it wiped out most of our summer-producing vegetables, including tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes and bush beans. All of a sudden, our garden stopped producing and we were out of home-grown food. Being used to fresh vegetables on a daily basis, this shortage of produce was quite a shock for us!
Luckily, my wife found a solution. It came in a shape of a chard. She asked me “Don’t we still have chard growing in the garden?” I said “Of course we have it. But it’s now too sturdy and bitter. You won’t like it’s taste in the salad, I can guarantee you that!” She replied “Don’t worry. I got an idea. Can you bring some from the garden?”
Without saying a word more, I went to the garden, brought back a basket full of chard leaves and left it on the porch. And the next day, once I came back from work, a mouth-watering lunch, made from fresh, home-grown ingredients, was waiting for me…
So, thanks to my lovely wife, we now no longer consider chard solely as a palatable salad green, but also as an all-around, incredibly versatile and useful vegetable. We now use it weekly in our kitchen as a healthy and tasty ingredient in pasta, rice, couscous, soups, tortillas and even smoothies. It’s so versatile. And the best part? You can use it all year round. From early spring until late autumn!
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