What to do with Swiss Chard

I made a dish called Eggs in a Nest from a book I read back in January entitled Animal, Vegetable, Miracle; A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver with Stephen L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver. If you're interested in where food comes from or what you're really eating when you purchase most of your food from the local grocer you might want to read this book. It's fascinating. The three authors are three members of a family who move to a farm and live off the land for a year. The authors daugther Camille added recipes and stories along with way of life as a college student eating unlike most college students. One of the recipes is Eggs in a Nest.


I added a little salt and pepper and parmesan cheese to the top of the eggs once they were poached. Clever Husband and Busy Girl loved it. They added some Tamari (wheat-free soy sauce) to theirs for some extra flavor. These photos are backwards and I don't have time to rearrange them now, but here what the chard looks like after it's been sauteed. I'm making the indentations for the eggs.

As you can see the raw chard below filled the cast iron skillet before it cooked down.

Here's the sauteed onion, garlic, carrots and dried tomatoes which are under the chard. I wasn't sure I'd like this combination with the tomatoes, but that was one of my favorite flavors in this dish. I used Sun-Dried tomatoes in olive oil.

Here's the brown rice in the cooker ready to go.

Why Grow it in the first place?

To be honest we've had some curious looks when we run down the list of the veggies we're growing when it comes to Swiss Chard. Some folks nod and smile and you can tell they're wondering why in the world we'd grow it, or they've never heard of it and don't want to appear ignorant of the lovely plant. Swiss Chard is in the beet family so the green tops look close to beet greens. The stalks which hold these leaves look like skinny celery or rhubarb stalks in colors ranging from pale green to deep red and even pink and yellow.
Swiss chard loaded with nutritious vitamins including vitamins K, A, C and E, plus several B vitamins, magnesium, manganese, potassium, iron and dietary fiber. Calcium is also in these beautiful plants along with cancer-fighting properties. The reason it's called Swiss Chard is because a swiss bontaist named Koch gave it's official scientific name of beta vulgaris. See told you it was in the beet family. That name doesn't conjure up affection toward this plant, but instead I read it "Vulgar Beets." Don't be alarmed! Nothing vulgar about this plant at all.

Greening up your diet can do nothing but good for your body so planting swiss chard is an easy way to add some healthy greens to your table. We bought "Bright Lights" which is a combo of colors and planted the seeds in late March. We've been harvesting the leaves for the past week and the plants show no signs of stopping. Cut the outside leaves with scissors just like lettuce and it keeps producing from the center of the plant.

Any takers willing to try adding swiss chard to their menus this week or to their gardens? Try the Eggs in a Nest for a nutritious meatless meal. It fills you up with lots lots good fiber, greens, and veggies, along with the protein in the egg and brown rice.

Here's to brave palates and colorful garden vegetables!

Garden questions and catch of the day

I''ve had several friends and family members ask questions regarding my garden, so I'll attempt to answer them here for all to benefit. First of all, check out the beds once they've been grided with twine. Cool, huh? In the second edition of Square Foot Gardening they suggest using lath, but to grid the beds and it is very white and pretty, but also pricey, so we found twine works just as well.

This second pic. shows a close up so you can see the holes and seedlings. It's amazing how many plants you can put in these beds. So far we've planted sweet, yellow, and red onions, radishes, peas, several lettuce varieties, swiss chard, beets, broccoli, cauliflower, and corn. A friend asked for the dirt recipe. Ha! I've had lots of recipe requests over the years, but I think this is my first one for "dirt." Here it is:

1 part compost

1 part peat moss

1 part vermiculite

Mix all together and fill beds. Our layers are: Newspapers, shredded leaves, and then the special dirt.

Someone else asked why this method might be better than container gardening. It's a huge space saver, and like I said above you can plant so much more in these 4x4 or 8x4 beds. Square Foot Gardening suggest you feed the plants some kind of fertilizer as the soil will become depleted eventually. This is why container medium should be replaced each year. There's nothing left to give to the plants.

These next photos are not gardening related, but I guess they would fall into the category of clever self-sufficiency. Kudos to my sons Carter and Blake who caught these trout on opening day in the Patapsco River.
The before and after shots of the trout. See that beautiful golden crust with all the flecks of orange zest and cilantro? Mmmmmmmm...... my mouth is watering just looking at it and remembering how good it was.

Carter's girlfriend, April found a tasty recipe for Salt-Crusted Trout and they treated us to a lovely dinner. The salt mixture included cilantro, orange zest, pepper, lemon juice, and basil. When it was baked the crust was cracked and each fish brushed off. It was incredibly moist and yummilicious. I know that's not a word, but it was the perfect word to describe the trout. They served it with rice, and this wonderful Thai cucumber salad.

You don't know how much it thrills me that my kids are clever enough to fish and are also creative in the kitchen with the catch of the day.

I'm leaving you with a gorgeous Maryland spring sunset. Enjoy your weekend with those you love. If you can't be with them, commit to praying for them.

Neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the Love of God that is in Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 8:39

Recession Gardening in pictures

We're not calling this a Victory Garden, but instead a Recession Garden. This is our way of fighting the cost of foods in the grocery stores, and making sure we're eating local and organic. As you can see we're giving up lawn to add more gardening space. We have other beds on the sides of the house, too, but it's time to get serious about our endeavors.

Here are the square foot garden boxes my clever husband built two weeks ago. Hopefully you can see the boxes in the background are lined with several layers of newspaper, and then shredded leaves. Thankfully the night he added these layers we got eight inches of snow to wet them nicely.

Shadow is the "super" for any work we do in the backyard. Here she is trying out one of the boxes. She made sure she sat in each box while keeping an eye on the master.

This photo shows me raking more leaves. My husband mows over the leaves, bags them and dumps them into the compost bin, and a couple of holding bins we have just for leaves. Our compost bin is in the background. We sometime see deer helping themselves to goodies at the top of the bin.
Composting our leaves and our kitchen scraps is an added benefit to our garden, and it's very easy to do. It's our version of "Black Gold."

Here is my husband dumping a wheelbarrow of our compost onto a tarp. The bags you see are vermiculite and peat moss which he'll dump out also onto the tarp. We've been reading Square Foot Gardening and Lasagne Gardening and have learned a way to mix these three things all together.

We had to really put some muscle into dragging this mixture in the tarp to combine it, but it only took fifteen minutes of back and forth mixing.

We mixed the components by walking and dragging the tarp to combine everything together. We were surprised at how well this worked without any raking.Here we are dragging it back down the hill to mix again.

One more time up the hill.

See that nice rich soil. My husband added fifteen shovels full to the wheelbarrow and then it took two loads to fill the four by four foot boxes, and doubled that amount for the large boxes.
Here a pic of our cute photographer taking a break from laundry and homework to see what mom and dad are up to. Of course some lovin' time with Maggie, our thirteen year old lab is always in order.

Here's one of the boxes filled and waiting to by planted. We sprinkled them all down with the hose and then it began to rain. We're supposed to have a drizzly rain for the next two or three days so a weather-imposed break from the garden will give us time to get our seeds organized and ready for their new homes. MMMmmmmm...... I can just taste those home-grown tomatoes now.

Five years ago this Brandywine tomato from our garden won a blue ribbon at our county fair, and we'll be growing them again this year.

It weighed 2 lbs. 6 ounces!
Working in the garden on these cold March weekends will have it's rewards! Tell me about your Recession Garden plans and what you'll be growing.

Here's to vine ripe tomatoes and the Lord's favor upon our gardens~

Dana

Eat the View

"Eat the View!" is a campaign to urge the Obamas to replant a large organic Victory Garden on the First Lawn with the produce going to the White House kitchen and to local food pantries."Eat the View" is coordinated by Kitchen Gardeners International, a Maine-based 501c3 nonprofit network of 10,000 gardeners from 100 countries who are inspiring and teaching more people to grow some of their own food.

I can get excited about this campaign. What a wonderful example our president and first lady could set for our nation in a time when we need to get back to basics if we're not already there. Wow, how I'd love to see compost bins, chicken tractors, and vegetable and flower gardens on the White House lawn. Can't you just picture it, now?