Tag Archives: Swiss Chard

Chard cakes with sorrel sauce

These chard cakes are the perfect vaguely healthy yet super decadent summer appetizer or side dish. They are seriously so good is difficult to describe. It’s this odd sensation of something super healthy and good for you like chard, and then made a little bit sinful by deep frying it, but then it’s covered in this really fresh and light tasting sorrel sauce. The recipe for the chard cakes is on p. 149 of Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty and is also featured online here.

This is how much I love swiss chard

I don’t think I’d ever cooked with swiss chard before starting this blog, but now I’ve cooked at least 4 recipes featuring it. It is just so good the way that Yotam Ottolenghi suggests making it, and it is especially well complemented by Greek yogurt, which I think has been a key ingredient in every swiss chard recipe I’ve made so far (I especially really loved the swiss chard with tahini, yogurt, and buttered pine nuts, featured here).

Here I am contending with my mountain of swiss chard

Unfortunately it’s summer and dry as a bone, so I don’t have any mushrooms or a mushroom lesson for you today, but I made this recipe for the first time with my friend Rachel, who is a fellow microbial ecologist and has started a blog herself teaching people about microbes – so check it out if you want to learn some microbial ecology :)

Ingredients for the sorrel sauce – sorrel, garlic, Greek yogurt, dijon mustard

As for the chard cakes, the first step is to make the sorrel sauce, which requires either a food processor or a blender. I used a food blender while making it at Rachel’s house and I used an immersion blender when I made it again at home. Personally I think the immersion blender was a bit easier but either works. Make sure to start boiling the water for blanching the Swiss chard while making the sauce because the sauce doesn’t take that long to make and you might get hungry while waiting for the water to boil!

Sorrel leaves

I don’t think I’ve ever cooked with sorrel in my life before! It grows wild all over California and my other friend Rachael, who I took mushroom hunting with me in Point Reyes, was pointing out and collecting the wild sorrel growing along the trails. Next time I will have to collect it myself in the woods, but this time I bought it from the Berkeley bowl. Blend the sorrel leaves, Greek yogurt, garlic clove, olive oil, and Dijon mustard until smooth.

Mixing together ingredients for the sorrel sauce

It makes a beautiful bright green sauce that I will have to find other uses for this week since we had a lot of extra! I think it would be good on cous cous or steak and would probably go well with grilled porcinis :)

Sorrel sauce in the immersion blender

I felt like I would totally fit in with all of the Berkeley and Oakland hipsters when Rachel gave me a mason jar to store the sorrel sauce in:

Sorrel sauce

Isn’t it beautifully bright green?

Sorrel sauce in mason jar

After the sauce is made the next step is to blanch the swiss chard. While the swiss chard is blanching, sautee pine nuts in oil. This is another repetitive theme in the Ottolenghi books and it is delicious! Pine nuts add such a nice decadent crunch to all of these dishes and they are so good toasted!

Blanched swiss chard with toasted pine nuts

Next add the egg, bread crumbs, salt, pepper, and cheese. I had no idea where to find kashkaval cheese but a quick google for substitutions on my iphone while at the grocery store found me mozzarella. Rachel, who has made the recipe before and said she went out of her way to find kashkaval cheese at a specialty cheese shop, said it tasted way better with mozzarella. The mozzarella was creamy and stringy which held together the cakes very well. Then came the fun part – mixing everything together and molding the cakes with my hands! While mixing the cakes we started heating up canola oil in a pan.

Adding the mozzarella cheese

Mixing up the chard cakes

Once the oil was hot we fried the cakes in the oil for 2-3 minutes on each side. This was pretty much my first time frying anything!

swiss chard cakes frying in oil

Don’t they look pretty when they start to brown?

Swiss chard cakes browning

Rachel didn’t have any paper towels but she did have leftover napkins from Halloween which we put to good use!

Chard cakes with lemon wedges and halloween napkins

These cakes tasted super decadent and delicious. They were satisfying and surprisingly not that unhealthy tasting given they were fried in oil.

Chard cakes fried to perfection

You have to make them yourself. Seriously, just go do it. You won’t regret it! Here is the ingredient list to help you out :)

Sorrel sauce:

3 cups sorrel leaves, washed
1/2 cup Greek yogurt
1 garlic clove, crushed
2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
salt

Cakes:

1.25 lbs Swiss chard
1/3 cup pine nuts
1 tbsp olive oil
4 oz kashkaval cheese, coarsely grated (I used mozzarella)
1 egg
6 tbsp dried white breadcrumbs
1/4 tsp salt
black pepper
vegetable oil for frying

Chickpea saute with Greek yogurt and couscous with tomato and onion

Ok, so yes, I know you are thinking – why is this girl calling herself fungi foodie when all she cooks is middle eastern food? Well guess what everybody – it’s been raining! A lot! In Berkeley! So I’m going to go mushroom hunting this weekend :) So with any luck I will have a delicious wild mushroom recipe for next week! Yay for wild mushrooms :)

But in the meanwhile, I’m continuing on my theme of cooking healthy, delicious vegetarian recipes from Jerusalem and Plenty. This week, I cooked the chickpea saute with Greek yogurt from pg. 211 Plenty and featured online here and the couscous with tomato and onion from pg 129 of Jerusalem and featured online here.

These dishes were on the less complicated side for Yotam Ottolenghi and my trip to Berkeley Bowl for groceries was one of the easiest and shortest trips yet! Either I’m getting much better at this whole grocery shopping thing or I am indeed choosing simpler recipes :P Here are all of the lovely fresh ingredients for the chickpea saute – look at all those fresh herbs and veggies! I really need to consider getting some potted herbs!

Ingredients for the chick pea saute

The first step is to separate the green part from the stalks of the chards – I’m totally falling for this stuff! It’s so pretty!

Swiss chard centers

So you blanch the chard stalks for 3 minutes in boiling water, then add the greens and blanch them for 2 more minutes, then remove from boiling water, rinse in cold water, and drain. Then you heat up 1/3 cup olive oil in a pan – Dan was appalled at this amount of oil – but I reminded him that olive oil is good for you :) He remained unconvinced but I decided to stick to Ottolenghi’s guidelines despite Dan’s rumblings. So you peel and chop up the carrots and saute them in the olive oil, then add caraway seeds. I’d never used caraway seeds before cooking from these books but they are such a good spice! I bought them super cheap from the bulk spice section at Berkeley Bowl and I’m totally hooked.

carrots sauteeing in olive oil with caraway seeds

So after the carrots are cooked, add the blanched chard back in, add in the chick peas (yes I used canned – perhaps a faux pas but after the disaster of trying to cook fava beans from scratch, I’m sticking to canned. It’s just so much easier!), add in garlic and fresh mint and parsley.

carrots with swiss chard, chicken peas, garlic, and herbs

Look at this ginormous bowl of vegetables!

Chick pea saute

But the finishing touch that really completes the dish is adding the Greek yogurt sauce on top. It just makes it so much tastier! And it adds a ton of calcium and protein – win-win :)

The greek yogurt on top really takes it up a notch!

chick pea saute with greek yogurt

So to accompany the delicious and healthy chickpea saute we made some couscous with tomatoes and onions. The first step is to dice and sautee an onion, then add sugar and tomato puree. Then dice two tomatoes (I added 3 because I love tomatoes!) and add them to the pan.

sauteed onions with tomatoes

In the meanwhile, add boiling vegetable stock to some couscous and leave it to sit in a bowl covered in cling wrap for 10 minutes. Once the couscous is cooked, then you mix in the tomato and onion mixture and wipe off the pan and add some butter to it. The next part gets a little bit complicated…at least for a novice like me….making the couscous crispy was no easy task! You are supposed to add butter then put the couscous back in the pan and cover it and let it steam for 12 minutes. Well, I did this and it was not quite crispy. Probably I should have let it steam for longer but we were hungry so I decided to just go for it…What followed was an EPIC FAIL where I flipped the couscous onto a dish and some of it landed on the floor but luckily most of it made it to the dish! I think I need to buy bigger dishes….

cous cous with tomatoes and onions

Ottolenghi has an amazing way with making vegetarian dishes that are completely satisfying and don’t make you miss meat one bit. These dishes are healthy, relatively cheap and easy, and super flavorful and fulfilling. The only complicated step that I utterly failed at was getting the couscous crispy and then flipping it over “expertly” onto a dish – so I did not manage to get that beautiful crispy crust that they claimed makes this dish. I still think it tasted amazing, but I think I will have to practice some more with the crisping and flipping..Here is my couscous with a corner of it looking crispy…it still tasted really good without the crispy crust but I will definitely need to practice with this one..

couscous with tomatoes and onion

Here is my completed meal :) It was a totally satisfying, healthy, flavorful, and fulfilling vegetarian middle eastern inspired meal. Thanks Ottolenghi for two more great dishes :)

Bon apetit! Healthy vegetarian mediterranean inspired meal!

Fattoush, Mejadra, and Swiss Chard with tahini, yogurt, and buttered pine nuts

Tonight I returned to Yotam Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem and prepared the fattoush (pg. 29), mejadra (pg. 120), and swiss chard with tahini, yogurt, and buttered pine nuts (p. 88).

My friend came over and was really hungry, so first I made the fattoush and we ate it as an appetizer. The fattoush is quickly becoming one of my favorite dishes from Jerusalem! This was my third time making it – it is one of the simpler dishes to prepare in this book – there are not that many esoteric ingredients and it doesn’t require any cooking – and it is just so good! It is jam packed with herbs and so refreshing.

Fattoush – middle eastern salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, pita, buttermilk, and herbs

After energizing myself with an appetizer of fattoush, I made the yogurt and tahini sauce for the swiss chard dish before starting on the cooked ingredients.

tahini and yogurt sauce for the swiss chard dish

All of the ingredients for the mejadra!

Next I started making the Mejadra, which is a middle eastern dish consisting of basmatic rice, lentils, fried onions, and lots of flavorful spices. This was a little more complicated. It not only required thinly slicing 4 onions, but then I had to fry all of them in oil which I had to do in batches.

4 medium sliced onions with flour and salt – getting ready to fry!

It was a lot of work! I’ve never fried onions before and it was hard to find the balance between making them crispy and brown and not burning them.

frying the onions in sunflower oil

I fried the onions while boiling the lentils. I don’t know why I’ve never made lentils before – they are super simple, cheap, and healthy. After frying all the onions and cooking the lentils, I made the rice.

rice with cumin, coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, sugar, allspice, and salt

First I sauteed the cumin and coriander seeds in the pan. I got the seeds from the bulk bins at the Berkeley bowl – so much cheaper that way! It only cost me 6 and 18 cents to buy the spices this way! I can’t believe how much money I’ve been spending on buying non- bulk spices! So then I mixed in a bunch of other spices – cinnamon, sugar, salt, allspice, and turmeric in with the basmatic rice. It smelled so amazing! This dish was definitely a winner.

rice and lentils and spice before adding the fried onions

mejadra with frid onions on top!

At this point I was getting pretty tired but luckily the next dish involved wine as an ingredient, so I opened up the bottle and served myself a glass :) Lauren and I took a bit of a dance break to shimmy around to my itunes shuffle before I started chopping the chard. I definitely need to get a larger pot – this recipe calls for a ton of swiss chard! How beautiful is the swiss chard though?

swiss chard

First I boiled the swiss chard then rinsed and drained it. Then I put butter and oil in the dish and made the hot buttered pine nuts – I’ve never made anything like this before – so absurdly decadent. It smelled so buttery and delicious. Not having a slotted spoon, I used a mixture of a spoon and a slatted spatula to remove the pine nuts from the butter before putting the garlic in the pan. The recipe states to carefully pour in the wine as it may spit – but this was an UNDERSTATEMENT. What followed was nothing short of a wine-splosion! My entire oven and surrounding kitchen were covered in splattered butter/wine mixture and I had to stay away for a while before it simmered down enough for me to turn down the temperature. Yotam is not kidding when he says be careful here!

unfortunately no pictures of the WINEsplosion, but here is the final dish with the hot buttered pine nuts on top

While this was a bit of a hectic evening with so many dishes and the mild explosion, it was totally worth it – these dishes are amazing and go so well together! Something about mediterranean cooking just makes you feel so good – it is rich and filling but contains so many fresh, healthy ingredients and spices that don’t weigh you down. Lauren happily giggled while eating the food and claimed that the kitchen smelled like her grandmother (Lauren’s half Lebanese). Thank you Yotam Ottolenghi for another inspired evening of meals!

Final meal: mejadra, fattoush, and swiss chard with yogurt, tahini, and buttered pine nuts

Lauren super excited to eat our feast!

getting ready to dig in!