Tag: vegetarian

Sautéed Swiss Chard with Onions

A distraught four-year-old girl came running into the house and announced to her mother, “Mom, Lisa won’t let me eat the sheep shower.”  Jerri and our son and daughter were visiting their grandmother in Rosalia, Kansas.  Since Jerri had grown up eating the shamrock-shaped leaves of this beautiful flower with her friends, she had naturally taught Jocelyn that it made a good snack between meals.

However, Jerri’s niece Lisa, who was babysitting Jocelyn, did not know that sheep shower was edible and did what a good babysitter was supposed to do–prevented her charge from poisoning herself.  This led to the crisis which Jerri quickly resolved by showing her teen-aged niece that sheep shower was safe to eat and really quite tasty.

I don’t know if Lisa ever developed a liking for sheep shower, nor is it one of my favorite vegetables, but I grew up with parents who believed that God gave us wild greens so we did not have to grow everything in the garden.  So we had fern fiddleheads and dandelion greens in early spring and lambs quarters when we pulled the young weeds throughout the summer.

Some people say that lambs quarters taste a bit like Swiss chard, which is rated as one of the most nutritious vegetables available.  Swiss chard is tied with spinach as a healthful addition to your diet, but chard has a more delicate flavor.  This relative of the common beet is very low in calories but has lots of calcium, iron and vitamin C.  It has almost no fat, but you can take care of that deficiency if you follow this recipe.

INGREDIENTS:

2 lbs. green Swiss chard (a large bunch with about ten leaves with the stems)
2 T olive oil
2 T unsalted butter
1 large onion ( at least 4 inches in diameter)
2 or 3 large cloves of garlic
3/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
Water as needed

PROCEDURE:

Wash the chard and trim the stalks at the cut ends.  Strip the leaves downwards from where the stems are about 3/16 inch in diameter.  Cut the stems into pieces about an inch long and set them aside in a bowl.  Roll or pile the leaves and cut them into one inch strips.  Set these aside in another bowl.

Clean and cut the onion in half lengthwise, then thinly slice each half.  Clean and mince the garlic.

Heat the butter and olive oil over low heat in a large skillet or frying pan.  Add the onion, about a quarter teaspoon of salt and a few grinds of black pepper.  Stir well to mix the spices and oil with the onion.  Cover the pan and cook the onion for about eight minutes, stirring it occasionally.

Turn the heat up to medium and stir in the chopped stems and minced garlic with a half teaspoon of salt and about a quarter teaspoon of pepper.  Cover and cook for another eight minutes, again stirring the mixture occasionally.  If the pan appears dry, add a couple of teaspoons of water.

Now add the chopped leaves.  If the pan is big enough, just stir them all in at once and cover the pan.  If you have too many leaves to put in the pan at once, add them in batches, stir them a few seconds until they wilt, then add more until you have them all in the pan.  Finish the chard by cooking another four or five minutes.

If you don’t like cooked spinach but know that you should be eating leafy green vegetables to protect your brain, heart, lungs, legs, arms, eyes and other essential parts of your body, try this recipe.  Chard has a mild taste complemented by the olive oil and butter that we find delicious.

Serve as a low carb side dish and offer vinegar as a condiment.  Jerri likes a dash of vinegar on both spinach and Swiss chard.

NOTES:  Chard begins wilting as soon as it is picked from the garden, so plan to use it that same day if possible.  If you store it in the refrigerator, it will be wilted but perfectly usable even two days after it is harvested.  Store leftovers in a covered container in the refrigerator; warmed, they are still very tasty.

I try to avoid recipes that use lots of dishes, but you can simply rinse out the bowls as you empty them.  Simple and efficient.  There is only one pan to wash.

Apple Pie

If you drive the back roads of northern Wisconsin, every once in a while you will come to a place where the “No Trespassing” signs are so closely spaced that you assume the landowner got a discount on them. On a hot sunny day in August of 1964, three fellow students and I from the University of Wisconsin found ourselves looking at a phalanx of ugly signs guarding an apple orchard at an abandoned farm near Mole Lake, Wisconsin.

Since the bottom line of each sign said “By Order of the Sheriff” we assumed three things: First, that the signs had been paid for with tax money, part of which we had contributed; second, that the orchard must be on public land; and third, that the sheriff was probably just hogging all those lovely apples for himself and his friends.

I said, “We could make some good apple pies with those apples.” An hour later we were back at the cabin on Mole Lake with two paper sacks and a T-shirt full of apples. One of the guys had gotten permission from an uncle to use the place for a week if we promised to leave it clean with the beer and bourbon supply intact. We made a quick run to the general store for extra flour, lard, sugar and cinnamon and began our pie-baking project.

While I made the crusts, the guys peeled and cut apples. We had hardly started when we discovered that we were in a truly primitive fishing cabin: There was only one pie plate in the place. However, there were three large cast iron frying pans and a 9 x 13 inch cake pan, and I assured everyone that no matter what your mother did, you don’t need pie plates to make pies.

We had apple pie for breakfast, lunch and dinner for three days in a row to go with the bacon, eggs, bass and bluegills. Though the crusts were not the best I have made, and we had to guess on the amount of sugar to mix with the apples, we thanked the sheriff for some of the best apple pies we had ever eaten. Not that we actually said anything to him, of course, but we were sincere in the comments we shared around the table.

As Paul Kelly sings, “Stolen apples taste the sweetest,” but we all knew that long before he wrote the song.

Here is how to make a tasty 9-inch double crust apple pie like the ones we enjoyed that week at Mole Lake. If you want to bake it in a 12-inch frying pan, you have to double the ingredients.

INGREDIENTS:

Pie crust
6 to 8 large tart apples
3/4 cup sugar plus a little to sprinkle on the crust
2 T flour
3/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
Dash of ground nutmeg
Dash of salt
2 T butter

PROCEDURE:

Make the pie crust dough first, but don’t roll the crust until the apples are prepared. Here is my recipe for plain pie crust.

Preheat the oven to 400º.

Peel, core and thinly slice the apples into a large mixing bowl. You should have about 6 cups of sliced apples. Mix the sugar, flour, spices and salt together in a small bowl and stir these dry ingredients into the sliced apples.

Line the pie plate with the bottom crust and fill it with the apples. With the right amount of apples, you should have to heap them a little to get them all in. Scatter small pieces of butter over the apples.

Roll out the top crust, dampen the edge of the bottom crust and seal the top crust to the bottom. Trim the crust and make a decorative edge with your fingers or a fork. Sprinkle the crust with a little sugar. Make four or five slits in the top crust to let steam escape as the pie bakes.

Bake 45 to 50 minutes or until juice is bubbling out of the slits.

Let the pie cool as long as you can wait and serve pieces with a large scoop of vanilla ice cream.

NOTES: The best apple pies are made by combining different varieties of apples. If you are buying apples at the market, choose at least two different kinds. Granny Smith, McIntosh, Braeburn and Jonathan apples are good choices. If you are using whatever kind is on the tree, taste an apple before you make the pie. If the apple tastes very sweet, add a tablespoon of lemon juice before you stir in the dry ingredients.

And if you are running short on pie crust, make Apple Cream Pie.