Chard at Work

Chard! This "bitter, pungent and slightly salty" relative of beets and spinach has been, slowly but steadily, settling in to the bed beside my perpetual monster spinach for a few months now. I have the rainbow variety, so my plants have a mix of green, red and yellow stems - it's really pretty! But also it just seems like such a "fancy" ingredient. I don't know what to do with it.

Luckily, Martha Stewart has me covered (not a phrase I ever thought I'd say): it's time for some chard pasta.

Every time I look at a recipe online I find myself a little annoyed by the comments section. "I made this but with completely different ingredients," they always say, "three stars out of five". I have no idea what the consistency is going to be like when the commenters all changed the flour or the ratio of liquid or threw in a bunch of dried fruit.

Well... today I'm that person. Martha Stewart's Rigatoni with Swiss Chard recipe is great but also I changed a fair bit when I made it. I can't tell you if her recipe, as written, is any good. I can tell you how it turns out with a few additions though.

Firstly, I didn't actually have that much chard. The recipe calls for a pound and a half and that's like 700 grams - which, in leafy greens, is a lot! My plants are still fairly little so I had to grab a few handfuls of spinach to go with it. Luckily, as you may recall, I have plenty of spinach. And while I was out there I remembered some carrots that I planted at some point last year. They were a really cute French variety that grow short and round instead of, well, carrot-shaped and I'm not really sure why I never harvested them - maybe I assumed they hadn't grown properly? After a while it just became a fixture of the garden to have them there.

Also one solitary white carrot that I have no memory of planting.

They've split a little and really branched out but, after a little googling to make sure they were still fine to eat, I decided to bring them inside. The splits were easily cut out (there's nothing wrong with those parts, they're just dried out) and it turns out that leaving your carrots in the ground all winter is actually a thing: it's called overwintering and, as long as you don't live somewhere that the ground freezes, they'll basically be fine. You're meant to mulch them for the coldest weather but I guess we didn't get too cold because these really did turn out fine without any attention for the last few months.

After a little scrub with a nail brush these cuties got to roasting while I started chopping everything else up. The chard was sliced into strips (including the stems, just in little pieces) and sat aside while I cooked some chorizo in the garlic and butter because when I first bought ingredients for this I could have sworn there was chorizo involved. There isn't meant to be but, luckily for me, everything is better with chorizo. I also didn't have any wine - we aren't a wine house - so I used chicken stock for the liquid, and since we aren't really a ricotta house either - can't have half a tub of ricotta going to waste - I used the entire tub (about 350g) instead of just a third of a cup.

Our lighting at night isn't so good, but you get the idea.

The end result was more than worth the effort, and I look forward to giving it another go (perhaps more faithfully to the original) once the chard has filled back out. It was quite rich and a little salty, and the chilli (I forgot to get flakes but ground chilli powder worked out fine) gives it a great warmth. The pine nuts were, predictably, my favourite part - I'm a sucker for anything to do with pine nuts - but even without them this would have been good, though they made a nice finishing touch.

Martha Stewart's Ricotta with Swiss Chard (and some additions): ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
The light cheese stops this being overwhelmingly rich, and the chilli and pine nuts make for a great variety in the flavour. 

I definitely recommend you give this one a go, and don't be afraid to improvise if you need to (or if, like me, you can't stop yourself adding chorizo to every dish). It isn't like we're baking here, after all - substitutions are easy to make and aren't going to completely spoil the dish even if they aren't the best choice in the end.