Every time I step into my backyard, I am amazed by how much Swiss chard my little garden is capable of producing. For going on 2 months, I’ve been eating chard a few times a week either with pasta or in garlicky sautés with potatoes or beans. And while I’m still not sick of it, I have started looking for a few new ways to prepare it.
This past weekend, I looked to one of my forever-favorite cookbooks for inspiration, Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Italian Cooking and found a recipe for tegliata di biete, a Swiss chard torta with pine nuts and raisins. Now this is the kind of recipe you might skip over if you were simply flipping through the book and didn’t happen to be sitting on a mountain of chard, but it’s exactly the sort of recipe I love to stumble upon. There’s nothing especially flashy about, but it’s a perfect example of how with effort and care, a few simple ingredients can be transformed into something entirely new, nuanced and intriguing.
Sometimes being a homeowner can feel like such a drag. The furnace fails, guess who’s on the hook. And when the walk needs to be shoveled, the lawn needs to be mowed, or the caulking around the shower starts to brown and peel? Yep, my problems, no one else’s.
I thought I was done blogging. I thought I’d finally had enough of the self-imposed stress and enough standing on chairs, photographing my dinner. I’d thought I was ready put the project on the shelf for good.
