Harvest Monday - April 8, 2013

It's all about chard again. This week I harvested both Golden and Flamingo chards.

That is what the garden is producing right now, but it will be coming to an end soon because both varieties are starting to bolt. So yesterday I harvested all the largest leaves off of the 2 Golden chard plants.

I used about half of the leafy parts in a saute last night. If you are like me, you probably have a few go-to dishes that you can put together any time, the ingredients are always on hand and it's something that you don't have to think too much about - great when you need to put something together quickly. My go-to chard preparation is to saute it, sometimes just the leaves and often the stems also, with some combination of onions and/or garlic, anchovy or bacon, raisins or currants, pine nuts, sweet or hot pepper flakes and a dash of some type of vinegar and lately I've been substituting fish sauce when I want that hit of anchovy umami. Let's just call that Auto Pilot Chard Saute and I wanted something different last night. Not a radically different preparation technique but a different flavor combination. What I ended up with was a sofrito of onion, grated carrot, and whole cumin seeds and then I  added slivered Meyer lemon peel and golden raisins and then wilted the chopped chard into the mix and finished it with Meyer lemon juice. It turned out to be a winner! My husband is on a carrot kick right now and he was delighted to find carrots in the mix and didn't complain too much about the lemon peel (I'm working on getting him to like citrus zest). I've posted my notes about this dish on my Kitchen Notebook blog.

The big stems are going to be used in a gratin tonight. Note how different the stems are from the 2 different plants. One plant is producing thinner more deeply hued stalks and the other plant is producing very broad flat stalks that are lighter in color. Both have crinkled and tender leaves.

The Flamingo chard harvest was prepared earlier in the week a la Auto Pilot Chard Saute. Good stuff.

Here's the harvest totals for the week:

Flamingo chard - 1 lb., 13.8 oz.
Golden chard - 3 lb., 1.7 oz.

The total harvest for the week came to - 4 lb., 15.5 oz. (a whole lotta chard to love)
Which brings the total harvests for the year for all the vegetables up to - 53 lb., 5 oz.
And that brings the total chard harvest up to 13 lb., 4.6 oz. for the year.

Harvest Monday is hosted by Daphne on her blog Daphne's Dandelions, head on over there to see some harvests other than chard chard chard!