I am taking down the Vegetable Project recipes from my sidebar, and putting them in this post instead.
I had a Mrs. Malaprop moment tonight when I asked my MIL to hold the baby so I could chuff the starred. If you want to do some chuffing of your own, here's how:
Prepare chard leaves by washing thoroughly and then cutting along the tough part of the stem -- two or three inches should do it. Blanch the leaves quickly (say a one-minute dunk in a little boiling water) and set them aside. Dice the stems, along with a rib of celery, a large onion, and a couple of fat cloves of garlic, and cook them all with a pound of ground turkey. You can add a handful of oats (raw) if you want to, or leftover rice (cooked) or whatever suits you. It's flexible. Think meatloaf. (My MIL was notorious for her meatloaf -- Jello, butterscotch pudding, dental floss remnants (okay, I made that up) -- if it was in the fridge, it was fair game.) Taste and see if it needs seasoned salt or Worcestershire sauce or whatever.
When the filling and the leaves are cool enough to handle, preheat the oven to 375 and spray a 9x13 baking dish. Spoon tomato sauce over the bottom. Overlap the edges where you cut out the tough stem, and plop a generous spoonful of filling onto the chard leaf. Fold the top half of the leaf over the filling, and tuck the sides under. Place the packet seam side down in the baking dish. When all your starred is chuffed, ladle a little more tomato sauce on top. Cover and bake for half an hour or so. Use a spatula to remove the chard packets; tongs will allow all the stuffing to fall back into the baking dish and may induce swearing in the patience-impaired.
You can also make a vegetarian filling like the one I use for involtini.
My husband does a lot of the cooking on the weekends (he thinks to himself, "Hmm, deal with fractious children at the dinner hour or retreat to the relative quiet of the kitchen?"), and one of his standby dinners is Ham & Beans. Quick, cheap, easy: soften a chopped onion in olive oil, add chunks of ham, stir in a couple of drained cans of beans and heat through. Serve with something green and painless like frozen peas; grownups like hot sauce to go with. (Do you say "go with" minus any object for the preposition? It sounded very bizarre to me when I moved away from the upper South to go to college, but now I say it all the time.*)
Tonight I had some beautiful organic kale in the fridge. I also had chard and turnip greens, so I thought I needed to use some of it quickly. The key, I think, in feeding greens to small children is making them inconspicuous. Blob of leaf spinach on the plate = mutiny (at my house, anyway); same quantity of spinach cut up finely in a quiche = thanks for dinner, Mom! After you stem the kale, cut it into narrow strips vertically. Pile those narrow strips together and, going horizontally this time, shred. Add to the Ham & Beans recipe with the onions and be sure to cook it until it's tender.
If you have leftover meat lurking in your fridge, you can make a easy dinner without heating up the kitchen. This comes from Nigella Bites, with a couple of alterations.
Combine one minced clove of garlic, 1T. sugar, 1½ t. rice vinegar, 1½ T. lime juice, 1½ T. fish sauce, 1½ T. vegetable oil, and red pepper flakes to taste. Add half of an onion which you have sliced finely and leave to stand for half an hour. If you use a red onion, it will turn a lovely color while it is steeping in the dressing.
Shred 8 ounces of cabbage (I think that's about a third of a small head) and one carrot. Cut some leftover chicken or beef into skinny strips. Toss in a big bowl with the dressing and add fresh mint or cilantro to taste. I add salt even though the fish sauce in the dressing is salty.
The 8yo and I thought it was delicious but the middle boys were not convinced.
*Mary was the only person who responded to my question about "go with" last month. Here's what she said:
Just read your recipes and your question about "go with" with no object. oooh, that freaks me out. I grew up in western Pennsylvania, where we have our own share of weird regional phrases and manners of speaking, but that one I can not abide. It's like an unresolved chord at the end of music or something. Go with WHAT??? WHAT?? I went to college in Philadelphia, which is where I first heard it, I think, amongst the Jersey-ites. Here in Nebraska, not so much, although a friend from Chicago says it. "Do you want to come with?" Come with what? Or whom? Aargh.
Anybody else?
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