Seasonal local food recipe No.334 – Chickpeas and chard

This delicious recipe, featured in The Guardian recently, is by Rachel Roddy.  I served it with feta cheese crumbled over the top.

Serves 4          

Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 15-20 minutes

Ingredients
250g dried chickpeas, soaked and cooked, or 400g tinned chickpeas, drained
600g chard
12 cherry tomatoes
6 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil, plus more for serving
2 garlic cloves
salt and black pepper
A handful of parsley, chopped
juice of 1/2 lemon
Ricotta, feta, goat’s cheese, lamb chops, or a poached egg, to serve

Method
Wash the chard and cut the stems from the leaves, trimming tough ends and pulling away any stringy bits.  Cut the stems into short lengths, then roll the leaves into cigars and chop roughly.

Bring a large pan of water to the boil, add salt. Add the stems for 1-2 minutes, then add the leaves for a few minutes more or until tender.  Drain.

Warm the olive oil over a medium-low heat.  Peel and crush the garlic for a milder flavour, or slice for a stronger hit.  Add to the pan with the cherry tomatoes.  Fry, squashing the tomatoes gently with the back of a spoon, until they are soft and the oil is tinted red.  Add the chard and stir until it glistens with oil, add the chickpeas and cook for a few minutes more.

Remove from the heat, add the parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, then let it sit for a while.  Before serving, check seasoning, and pour over a little more oil.

Seasonal local food recipe No.329 – Chard, olive and mozzarella pizza

My husband in his quest to create the perfect sourdough pizza adapted a recipe from London pizzeria Franco Manca‘s book Artisan Pizza To Make Perfectly At Home.  They use wild broccoli or friarelli, but Frank used chard from this week’s veg box.  Choose your favourite pizza base (Frank makes a sourdough base from scratch but you might prefer to buy one!) and then cook the pizza as you would normally.

Serves 4

Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 30 minutes

Ingredients
4 pizza bases
200g chard leaves
1 tbsp olive oil
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 red chilli, finely chopped
sea salt

For the tomato sauce:
1 can plum tomatoes, ‘mashed’ by hand and ‘lumpy bits’ removed
1 garlic clove, finely grated
1 tbsp olive oil

1 mozzarella cheese
black olives
basil leaves

Method
To make the tomato sauce, heat the oil in a pan, ad the grated garlic and fry gently for 2-3 minutes.  Add the tomatoes and cook until reduced by about 50%.  Remove from the heat and leave until needed.

In another pan, heat the olive oil and fry the garlic and chilli over a medium heat.  Add the chard leaves, some salt and a drop of water and cover.  Cook for about 4 minutes.  Drain well and squeeze excess water from the leaves before using.

Spread the tomato sauce over your pizza bases.  Lay some chard down on the pizzas and then top with mozzarella, olives and basil.  Cook the pizzas in your usual way.

Rainbow chard in our spring vegetable boxes

In all the veg boxes this week:-
*rainbow chard
*mixed salad leaves (rocket, baby chard, mizuma, golden mustard, red mustard, lettuce)
*radishes
*parsley
leeks (Restharrow Farm, Trebetherick)
Jerusalem artichokes (Restharrow)
*potatoes (Burlerrow Farm, St Mabyn)

Standard boxes also have:-
extra potatoes
*purple sprouting broccoli OR broad beans
*spring onions
beetroot (Restharrow)

* = grown to organic principles
Please wash all vegetables and fruit. All produce grown by Camel CSA unless otherwise indicated.

Try these chard dishes on Camel CSA’s recipes page: –
Trouchia (chard omelette)
Sag aloo  (Indian spiced chard with potato)

Seasonal local food recipe No.230 – Chard baked with cream and parmesan

This tasty side dish is from the Riverford Organic Farms’ cookbook.  It can also be made with spinach.

Serves 4

Preparation time: 5-10 minutes
Cooking time: 25 minutes

Ingredients
200g cooked chopped chard (or spinach)
1 egg, beaten
200ml double cream
1 tbs grated parmesan
salt and pepper to taste

Method
Mix together all the ingredients.  Bake in a gratin dish at 150°C/Gas Mark 2 for about 25 minutes until just set.

Seasonal local food recipe No.223 – Jamie’s and Ami’s flavoured greens

This week’s recipe comes from chef Ami Phillips at Relish Food & Drink in Wadebridge. A couple of days ago she created platters of antipasti for the lunchtime menu using the contents of a Camel CSA veg box. Everybody wanted some!

Ami is a graduate of Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Cornwall restaurant at Watergate Bay. Her food is heavily influenced by Italian cooking and she’s been at Relish for 15 months. She got this recipe while working at Fifteen. It can be done using any type of greens, but is a great use for chard.

Serves: 4
Preparation /cooking time: 15 minutes

Ingredients
4 large handfuls of chard or other greens
3 large cloves of garlic
1 red chilli
olive oil
knob of butter
2-3 tbsp balsamic vinegar
sea salt
black pepper

Method
Trim and wash your chard thoroughly. Run a knife down the length of any stalks to ensure faster, more even cooking.

Blanch for 2 minutes in boiling salted water. Tougher winter greens may need longer cooking. Then refresh under cold running water, drain well and set aside.

Grate the garlic cloves, de-seed the red chilli and dice it finely, then put it all in a bowl and cover with olive oil. Heat a frying pan, melt a good chunk of butter and add the chilli and garlic mixture, stirring over a low heat so as to not add colour. Add the chard  and 2-3 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, Cornish sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Once everything is piping hot, serve!

Seasonal local food recipe No 159: Hugh’s chardy cheese

One vegetable that thrives during a wet English summer is Swiss chard. Camel CSA has a huge bed of it in rainbow colours and the picking usually involves us in a big team effort.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says: “This hearty dish gives chard the cauliflower cheese treatment. It makes a side dish to chops or sausages, but I’d happily eat it as a main course with a hunk of bread.”

Serves: 4

Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 40 minutes

Ingredients
About 750g chard
Small knob of butter
About 50g breadcrumbs
A little rapeseed or olive oil
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper

For the sauce:
300ml whole milk
½ onion, peeled and cut in two
1 bay leaf
A few black peppercorns
20g unsalted butter
20g plain flour
75g strong, mature cheddar, grated
25g parmesan or vegetarian alternative
(or mature hard goat’s cheese, grated)
¼ tsp English mustard

Method
Heat the oven to 190C/375F/gas mark 5 and lightly grease a shallow, ovenproof dish.

For the sauce, put the milk into a saucepan with the onion, bay and peppercorns. Bring to just below simmering point, turn off the heat and leave to infuse for at least 30 minutes, and an hour or two, ideally.

Meanwhile, separate the chard leaves from the stalks, and cut the stalks into 1.5cm slices. Bring a large pan of salted water to a boil, drop in the leaves and blanch for a minute or two, until just wilted. Remove the leaves with tongs, drain and, when cool enough to handle, squeeze out excess water with your hands, then roughly chop. Meanwhile, drop the chopped stalks into the boiling water and blanch for three to four minutes, until just tender. Drain, toss with a knob of butter, season and spread over the base of the oven dish.

If the infused milk has cooled completely, warm it gently, then strain into a jug. Melt the butter for the sauce in a medium saucepan over a fairly low heat, then stir in the flour to form a smooth paste (a roux). Cook gently, stirring frequently, for a minute or two. Remove from the heat and add a third of the milk. Stir vigorously with a wooden spoon or whisk until you have a thick, smooth paste. Add the rest of the milk in one or two lots, stirring it in until smooth.

Return the sauce to the heat and bring to a boil, stirring. Let it bubble for two minutes, stirring every now and then, to “cook out” any taste of raw flour, then turn the heat right down. Add the cheeses and mustard, stir gently until they melt into the sauce – don’t let the sauce boil, or it may curdle – and season.

Stir the chopped chard leaves into the hot cheese sauce and pour over the stalks in the dish. Scatter with the breadcrumbs and a trickle of oil, and bake for 20 minutes, until golden and bubbling.

• This recipe from is similar to one of my favourite comfort dishes – Swiss chard and potato gratin.

Green leafy veg ‘may reduce diabetes risk’

The mounds of Swiss chard picked for our veg boxes this week could help prevent us developing type 2 diabetes, according to the British Medical Journal.

Researchers from Leicester University found that one and a half portions of green leafy vegetables every day could result in a significant 14 per cent risk reduction in getting the disease. You can see the BBC report on their findings here.

Green leafy veg include chard, spinach, cabbage, kale and lettuce – and are all found in abundance in Camel Community Supported Agriculture’s weekly veg boxes at different times of the year.

Tasty chard in the veg boxes

… as well as more of the mixed basil, baby carrots and other spring vegetables, all supplied by two of Camel CSA’s expert growers – Mark Norman of Bodmin and Jeremy Brown of St Kew Harvest.

* new potatoes (Mark)
* carrots (Mark)
* Swiss chard (Jeremy)
* salad bag (Jeremy)
* basil (Jeremy)

Standard boxes will also get:
* extra potatoes
* calabrese (Mark)
* spring greens (Jeremy)

* = grown to organic principles

This week’s boxes

We are enjoying some more of our recently-harvested onions in Camel Community Supported Agriculture’s veg boxes this week. 

The Swiss chard, beetroot and potatoes also come from our own plot at St Kew Highway. 

Our expert growers have provided most of the rest of the vegetables.  Jeremy Brown cultivated some of the cucumbers and the flat-leaved parsley.  Jane Mellowship supplied the salad packs.  Mark Norman grew the courgettes and the remaining cucumbers, which feature in our Recipe No 7 – Cucumber raita.

We have a new local supplier – Polmorla Market Garden, Wadebridge – which provided the freshly-picked runner beans.  Unlike the rest of the box contents, these are not grown organically.

Oops!

The boxes also contain bunches of celeriac leaves, picked in ignorance as they were mistaken for mature flat-leaved parsley. 

These could be used as a garnish on salads or soup.  However they are rather coarse and have a distinctive, strong flavour.

It emerges that I may have caused irrevocable damage to our celeriac crop as a result of this inadvertent act of horticultural vandalism.  This is one of the downsides of relying on enthusiastic amateurs like me. 
S-o-o-o embarrassing!

This week’s share of the harvest