table talk / By Simona Carini

Charmed by Chard

(June 9, 2011)  As the season progresses, a wider variety of fresh fruit and vegetables becomes available at the Arcata Farmers’ Market. But from the very first day, Swiss chard could be purchased from several farmers. If you managed to walk all around the Plaza last Saturday and go home without any chard in your basket, you’ll have time to make up for it. In fact, the Humboldt Local Produce Availability Chart (downloadable from Humboldt CAFF: www.caff.org/humboldt), tells us that chard is available year-round.

Why would you want to be tempted into putting (at least) a bunch of chard in your basket? First, because chard is good for you. A New York Times article by Tara Parker-Pope, “The 11 Best Foods You Aren’t Eating” (June 30, 2008), lists Swiss chard in third position, describing it as “a leafy green vegetable packed with carotenoids that protect aging eyes.” (If your doctor recommended limiting or avoiding chard because of its oxalate content, you should comply with the recommendation.)

Rainbow chard PHOTO BY SIMONA CARINI

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So, chard is good for you, but what about its flavor, texture and looks? Chard is a winner in all those categories. I’ll deal with the last characteristic first. A deep green body and legs of various colors give chard a fascinating and photogenic look — in particular, “rainbow chard.”

According to Alan Davidson’s ThePenguin Companion to Food, “The history of chard has been traced back to the famous hanging gardens of ancient Babylonia … Cicla in the vegetable’s scientific name [Beta vulgaris ssp cicla] derived from sicula, which refers to Sicily, one of the places where chard first grew. Chard is popular around the Mediterranean especially in Provence and Nice, and in Catalonia … where the leaves are often prepared with pine nuts and raisins, a dish with Arabic origins.”

I liked this vegetable even as a child in Italy where the word for chard is bietola, or bieta. The variety of chard I knew there was the one with a white stalk. When I moved to California I was introduced to technicolor chard. My mother would boil chard and then serve it at room temperature dressed with olive oil and lemon juice, or ripassata — warmed up in a frying pan with olive oil and garlic. She also used it as stuffing for double-crust pizza. While I have made variations of all of the above, here I will offer two other possible uses.

Large leaves of chard just beg to be filled and rolled. Once cooked, they need to be handled with care, but there is enough material that usually your involtino (roll) will look good even when there is a little mishap in the rolling. Consider my recipe simply a suggestion: Exercise your imagination in combining ingredients for the filling. A nice characteristic of this recipe is that it uses both the leaves and the stalks.

For ideas on preparing chard for stuffing I turned to Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. From the same source I took also the idea of chopping the chard stalks and adding them to the filling.

For the filling, I use either hull-less barley or quinoa, a nutritious seed (it contains all nine essential amino acids) that coincidentally is a relative of chard as well as spinach and beets (they belong to the same subfamily, Chenopodioidae).

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