Super Chard Meal

"If vegetables got grades for traditional nutrients alone, Swiss chard would be one of the vegetable valedictorians. The vitamin and mineral profile of this leafy green vegetable contains enough "excellents" to ensure its place at the head of the vegetable Dean's List. Our rating system awards Swiss chard with excellent marks for its concentrations of vitamin K, vitamin A, vitamin C, magnesium, manganese, potassium, iron, vitamin E, and dietary fiber. Swiss chard also emerges as a very good or good source of copper, calcium, vitamin B2, vitamin B6, protein, phosphorus, vitamin B1, zinc, folate, biotin, niacin and pantothenic acid. "
(quoted from whfoods.com)

I knew that swiss chard was good for me, but I honestly had no idea HOW good it was until I read this on a website as I searched for the nutrients of swiss chard.

I was curious about it because we had a Super Chard meal tonight. First, it was a super chard meal in that it had a very large amount of swiss chard in it, but it also tasted DELICIOUS! Both Blake and I were raving as we ate it how good it was and how we would be willing to eat it again.

We had chard two different ways. First was from the recipe I quoted the first time I was looking for swiss chard. It's called stuffed chard with fresh marinara. We used some marinara we had made a while back and frozen, but it was still really good. There is a meat/breadcrumbs mixture that it put inside the swiss chard leaf, and then you steam it in chicken broth, and top with fresh marinara.

The reason for having a second chard item in the meal is that it used about 2/3 of our chard... but I didn't have another meal coming up before Wednesday that would really benefit from chard on the side (fajitas with a side of chard? it just doesn't work for me lol). So I asked Blake if I could just find a recipe and use it up tonight on the side. He was fine with it. I found a cookbook downstairs with a super simple recipe that is simply sauteing the chard in olive oil for the majority of its cooking time, and then get it down to wilted with lemon juice and chicken broth (which I also had leftovers of, conveniently enough).

To use some of our dill, and because it sounded so good when I found it in my Preserving Summer's Bounty book, we made a dill garlic butter, and then used that to make some really good garlic bread.

Overall the meal was a huge success, and it has helped me realize that Swiss Chard really had a bad rap for nothing, but it is really a very good leafy green.

A few side notes on meals this week- 1, I found out that I was right, it is another variety of kale, and that will go into a soup tomorrow. 2, we have both recently discovered the joy of a simple salad with lemon juice, olive oil, dill and feta, and we have eaten that more than once this week. I decided to add some tomato and cucumber from our garden just to make it more interesting, but Blake would prefer it just with those four ingredients. I do have to say that with the cucumber and tomato added it is good enough to bring for a potluck I am going to Tuesday. Yay for the joys of fresh produce!