I just wanted to say

That it might be cold, but with a pair of smart-wool tights and thick jeans, hiked up cashmere socks tucked into thinsulate boots, two cotton shirts, a wool sweater, a scarf, a hat, leather mittens, and a down vest on top, it's really not that bad out there. Even the Swiss chard—upright and perky despite a dip into the twenties in the greenhouse last night—seems to agree.

I was worried about it yesterday, so for dinner we made a spur-of-the-moment, balsamic-doused salad with Swiss chard, raw shaved beets, chunks of apple and crumbles of goat cheese, toasted pecans, grated Brussels sprouts, and dried cranberries.

I thought of you.

And it was lovely.

The Local Food Report: full strength sea

Did you know that not all Wellfleet oysters are created equal?

This oyster, the wild banana oyster, is the one that shuckers preferred years ago. They were selling oysters by the jar, and this long, thin banana oyster had a whole lot of meat inside. It's from Chipman's Cove and it grows in the mud, just far enough down that it has to stretch to get up and out of it for air, and so it's constantly growing skinny, up. It used to be this biomass banana people picked.

But then, the game changed. Wellfleet made a name for itself—people in the midwest wrote letters cross country about those sweet jars of Wellfleets they found on their supermarket shelves—and the raw bar market sprang up. Tourists and locals wanted their meat served on the half shell, and the deep cupped West Side and the manicured grant oysters with their round, shapely figures jumped in.

The West Sides grow on sugar sand bottoms, places where there's deep water and rough sediment and every time the tide turns any sharp, thin edges get chipped off. A grant owner creates this same look by pulling their oysters out, knocking off the beaks and coaxing them into wide, deep shells.

The funny thing is, they all taste the same. The flavor of an oyster is determined by the water, and in Wellfleet, we are full strength sea salt. Most people, myself included, would take our raw thirty-three parts per million over a southern oyster—those flat-tasting warm water creatures from Virginia and Florida—any day, whatever the shape.

If you get those deep-cupped West Sides or a nice, wide grant shell, though, you almost have to try Oysters Rockefeller. The greens and the herbs and the sherry and the cheese—they just fit. The wide, deep cup holds the juice and the meat and the flavor all at once, and if you're any good at shucking, they take hardly a quarter hour to make. They're elegant and dressy and just sophisticated enough, and the way they feel on your tongue is like pure luxury slipping down.

We ate six last night—six West Sides Rockefeller with two glasses of white wine and my grandmother's tiny silver oyster forks. While we sat the radio signal went silent and the dark crept up the windows, and we decided instead of turning on the lights to simply tuck in, leave the dishes, and go to bed. I can't say if it was the oysters or the quiet or the wine, but it all felt very extravagant.

Wherever you live, and whatever sorts of oysters you have (please don't tell me, please don't, that you have none at all), I highly recommend you pick up a bag this afternoon. Look for the ones with the deep cups, the tall sides, the wide, holding shells, and make sure you have a shucking knife. Crack them open over a bowl, and save the juice, then sauté up your best spring greens with some sherry and herbs. Turn on the broiler and just as the air begins to chill, arrange the meats in their shells with a frock of green and a sprinkle of grated Parmesan or pecorino on top. Pull them out just as the cheese begins to sizzle and brown, and eat them as the sun goes down.

OYSTERS ROCKEFELLER

This recipe is somewhat adapted from one a very talented former Mac's Shack chef passed along, but mostly, it is made up. The chef's recipe had an incredibly daunting number of steps and soaks and sautés—the sort of undertakings that would be okay for a whole night of service at a nice restaurant, but absolutely ridiculous for a half dozen oysters at home—so I took a rough inventory his ingredients and technique and reinvented it on my own. The result was delicious, simple, and so long as your oyster shucking technique does not involve a garden glove, a layer of dish towels, and a lot of fear, also very fast.

6 oysters
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 shallot, thinly sliced
2 ounces spinach, chopped into small pieces
2 ounces Swiss chard, chopped into small pieces
salt to taste
1 tablespoon finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
1 tablespoon finely chopped dill
1 teaspoon fresh thyme
2 tablespoons sherry
1/2 tablespoon butter
2 ounces grated Parmesan or pecorino cheese

Shuck the oysters, reserving the liquid and meats in a small bowl. Scrub the bottom shells clean and set them aside; throw the tops in the compost.

Heat up the olive oil in a large sauté pan over high heat. Add the shallot and sauté for about 30 seconds, or until it just starts to brown. Throw in the spinach and Swiss chard, and sauté, stirring vigorously, for about a minute. Add the herbs and continue sautéing for another minute or two, or until the greens are completely wilted.

Pour the sherry around the edges of the pan to deglaze; it should sizzle and almost instantly disappear. Pour in the oyster liquid, taking care not to let any oysters slip in. Stir in the butter and continue cooking for another minute, or until the oyster liquid is reduced by half, all the alcohol in the sherry has cooked off, and the butter is absorbed. Turn off the heat and set the greens aside.

Preheat your oven broiler and arrange the six bottom oyster shells on a baking sheet. Place an oyster meat in each one. Divide the sautéed greens evenly between the six shells, gently layering a spoonful on top of each of the oysters. Top the greens with the grated cheese, and broil the oysters for 2 minutes, or until the cheese turns golden brown. Devour at once.

The Local Food Report: Seed Ordering

Today, finally, I placed my seed order. Ordering seeds always seems very daunting to me—like taking on the Impossible Project or maybe surviving a twenty-six-point-two-mile run.

I was thinking about this the other day while playing eeny-meeny-miny-moe with Crisp Mint and Rouge d'Hiver on the lettuce page of the Fedco catalog, and I decided it was time to get help. (For seed ordering. Just to be clear.) I called my friend Tracy (who helped me start a garden for the chefs at one of Alex's restaurants last spring), and she told me to talk to a friend of hers, Master Gardener Celeste Makely. I met Celeste in her sunroom, we talked for two hours about seeds and seedlings and garden planning and even baked tomatoes. She sent me home with a tiny fig tree, a homegrown Valencia orange, and all sorts of excellent recommendations. I am not very good at sharing oranges, or potential fig factories, but fortunately, I do much better with notes. So for those of you who aren't quite sure what you want to plant, here are Celeste's top seed picks for 2010:

1. Danvers (carrot)

Apparently, the reason carrots are so tricky to grow is because they need a very fluffy soil. If they don't get it, they tend to become distorted. Unless they're Danvers. Celeste says these carrots stand up particularly well to heavy soils, and are thin and long with a strong top. (For yanking.)

2. Spinach and lettuce of any kind

Spinaches and lettuces are, by definition, easy, Celeste says. Order what you think is tasty, or pretty, plant a bunch, and don't worry about it too much unless the weather gets outrageously sunny and hot. If that happens, give the plants some shade and some water, and they will soldier on. Depending on how you plan to plant your garden, it might be a good idea to buy some early and late varieties, and some that can stand the heat. This way you can be in greens all the time.

3. Chioggia (beet)

These are those pretty magenta and white swirled beets you see at the farmers' markets all the time. Celeste cooks sometimes at the soup kitchen in Provincetown, and last year, a local gardener donated a whole bunch of these. She says they were the hit of the season—wonderfully sweet just roasted with a little bit of oil and salt and pepper.

4. Early Spring Burpless (cucumber)

Celeste likes these for slicing, because they are early, and prolific, and inside their bright white flesh is oh-so-crisp. They also grow long, and don't have too many spines.

5. Bush Pickles (cucumber)

These are ideal for people who don't have much space, but want lots of cucumbers and lots of pickles. Celeste says they grow small (about four to five inches, a.k.a. ideal pickle length), and stay firm, even jarred.

6. Bright Lights (Swiss chard)

We grew Bright Lights Swiss chard in our garden last year, and I can attest to its fabulous-ness. We planted it twice, once in the early spring, and once at the end of August, and we have been in red-yellow-pink-and-orange chard from April through today. I know! Two plantings, a million cuttings, lots of salads, lots of stir-fries, a whole bunch of soups, one Swiss chard gratin, a whole lot of blanching and freezing, and several pounds of onions and garlic later, and we are still eating from a single pack of seeds. Celeste likes it because it's beautiful, and prolific, and easy, and as I just mentioned, about as versatile in the kitchen as one green can be. She found this recipe for goat cheese rolled up in chard leaves and grilled, which even without having tried it I feel I can heartily recommend.


7. Pointsetta (hot pepper)

Pointsetta wins purely on cuteness. It's a new pick for Celeste this year, but she likes the way that the peppers point up instead of down, and are very bright and tiny and generally adorable. She's doing a demo garden for the new Wellfleet Community garden plots, and she says that when she saw this she simply couldn't resist.

8. Jalapeño (hot pepper)

Believe it or not, Celeste recently had a Jalapeño plant that lived for five years. She says she simply planted it in a pot, and brought it inside in the fall and back out again every spring. Jalapeños are easy, and better yet, produce peppers that sliced in half, stuffed with cheese, and broiled, will bring you to your knees.

9. Herbs (not Rosemary, or Parsley)

At least not from seed. Rosemary and Parsley are both difficult to germinate, Celeste says, and not worth your trouble at all. Get them, but buy them already robust in little pots at the garden store. As for the rest, plant Oregano and Spearmint but watch out because they spread, and accumulate as many varieties of Thyme and basil as you can. Oh! and while we're on basil, Celeste thinks Genovese, the big, broad-leafed Italian variety is very nice, as are Thai basil and lemon basil.

10. Tropical fruits (huh?)

Celeste's last recommendation is just in case you decide that this year, you want to go big time. She has a sunroom on the south side of her house, and for a while now, she's been experimenting with tropical fruit trees. Based on my Valencia-orange-eating-in-February experience, I'd say it's been a wild success. In addition to the oranges, she's ordered and successfully nursed to maturity a Meyer lemon tree, a Ponderosa lemon tree (which produces fruit the size of baseballs!), and several varieties of Italian figs. (The seeds for which her grandfather brought over from Italy.) She thinks that if you have a sunny room, you should go for it.

There you have it—Celeste's top ten for 2010. Before I go, though, a few notes. You probably noticed there are no tomato varieties up there. That's because next week, I will be bringing you another of Celeste's seed-ordering lists, this time ONLY for tomatoes. Yipee!


And a note about seed ordering: Celeste orders most of her seeds from Totally Tomatoes, which carries both tomatoes and a few other plants, like hot peppers and cucumbers and basils. It's a great catalog for anyone, but maybe more so for a tomato zealot like Celeste than for the rest of us.

I order all of my seeds from Fedco, a Maine-based company that I like because it a) sells only seeds adapted to our cold New England climate, b) is very committed to sustainable growing and non-GMO seeds, and c) has in its catalogs sections like "How Not to Order" and seed descriptions like this. Reading it makes my eyes water and my sides hurt.

To request a Fedco catalog, all you have to do is click on over here, and then call and leave a message with your name and address. They say it might take a few weeks to get it, but mine only took a few days. Have fun!

The Local Food Report: warm, lush

Arthur Teubner lives in Truro. His roommates include one fig tree, one taro plant, a rosemary bush, a whole bunch of rainbow chard and spinach and arugula, and a potted banana plant. As you can see, it's very cozy in there.

The coziness has a lot to do with glass, and the sun. In the seventies, Teubner volunteered at the New Alchemy Institute in Hatchville, and he got very into the idea of incorporating growing space into living space. The Institute was a research center studying organic agriculture and aquaculture and bio-shelters, and it created an indoor eco-system called The Ark. The basic idea was to build a greenhouse for both shelter and food, and to populate it with species that would compliment and regulate each other as they grew. It was very successful, and Teubner took the idea with him.

He built his house about a decade later, with his own plans and hands and a lot of recycled materials. He designed it to sit on a south-facing slope overlooking his garden (which has since turned into a farm, First Light Organic Farm), and an orchard of fruit trees. It was an upside-down home with three floors: on top, a master bedroom and bathroom and study, in the middle a kitchen and dining room and living room, and on the bottom, an extra bedroom and an attached greenhouse. By building the greenhouse onto his home, he reasoned, he could grow warmer-climate crops or over winter native crops by regulating the temperature in conjunction with his living space. This seemed more sustainable to him than having a separate, independent structure that he would have to supply with nutrients and heat.

But that isn't even the cool part.

The cool part is that the way he did this was to incorporate the air from the greenhouse into his home. He cut power registers and ducts into the walls and ceiling of the greenhouse, so that if the sun creates excess heat, he can pull it into his home. He created heat sinks in the form of brick flooring and dark earth growing beds, and he built a row of cylindrical water columns to act as solar heat sinks. He also added a indoor fish pond that connects to an outdoor fish pond, so that the protein he raises can swim in or out depending on the weather or temperature or just what sort of an adventure it feels like taking that day. When the fish have been swimming and eating for a while, he takes the nutrient rich water from their pond to water the vegetable crops.


Finally, he planted grapes—Concords and a few other leafy varieties—along the east and west sides of the greenhouse. He trained them to grow up along the sides and over to cover the top, and in the summer, they leaf out. The greenery blocks the sun in the summer, keeping the greenhouse cool and shady. In the fall, the leaves drop, and the light is allowed back in.

There are clearly a lot of good features to this indoor growing space. For starters, when he's cooking dinner, Teubner can sneak downstairs in his socks or even bare feet and pick a whole meal's worth of chard and arugula and thyme.


He can also grow plants that normally wouldn't survive in this climate, like figs and bananas, because they spend the winter protected, inside. Lastly, and sometimes he thinks most importantly, when it is February or March on Cape Cod and the weather report says GREY for the seventy-second day straight, he has a warm, lush, almost Costa-Rican place to go. This insanity salvation, he says, is almost better than the fresh figs.

Of course, most of the year, his food production in the greenhouse focuses on leafy salad plants. The figs and grapes and whatnot come in a big September-October whoosh, and from there it's herb and cold crop time. The day I visited, last weekend, he had Swiss chard, arugula, lettuce mix, spinach, and Dinosaur kale going on. It actually looked a fair amount like what we have in our not-so-toasty, unattached greenhouse right now, except that everything was bigger, and a bit healthier, and not looking quite so desperate for heat and sun.

By the time I got home, I was trying to figure out how we could build a greenhouse onto the south side of our house and whether or not I would rather have a fig tree or a banana tree, or maybe even a lime tree, or if maybe I should just fill the beds with oregano plants. Of course, I was getting a little bit ahead of myself. In the end, I drew a lot of pictures and researched green design architects online and made myself a pot of barley and winter greens soup.

A Costa Rica Room would be nice, one day. But in the meantime, the soup turned out to be cheap, and tasty, and a very good second best.

SO FRESH AND SO GREEN (!)

[I am so, so sorry for the bad pun title. Hopefully Outkast will forgive me. And hopefully you will forgive me for discovering the Lala Song Player and, yet again, giving you a link with sound.]

As for the soup, it's excellent. It's adapted from a recipe I found the other day in the Feburary issue of Bon Appetit, now that I (ahem), finally got it back from my sister. Anyway, it's for a barley soup with kale, chard, spinach, fennel, lemon, and dill, which, as soon as I saw it, I knew was for me. I changed a few things, but the idea is the same. This soup is bright and light and hearty all at once, and in a much more wholesome way than the song, really and truly very fresh and very clean. There is something almost squeaky about it, in the same way that, say, lying in a mud wrap with cucumbers on your eyelids is. Best of all, it is an excellent first use for our brand new, New England grown ( ! ) barley.

2/3 cup uncooked barley
8 cups chicken broth, preferably homemade
4 cups water
sea salt
2 tablespoons butter
3 medium onions, chopped
1 teaspoon dried dill weed*
1 teaspoon dried, crushed fennel seed
1 teaspoon dried, crushed basil
freshly ground pepper to taste
1/4 cup dry white wine
8 cups Swiss chard, rinsed, coarsely chopped, and packed**
8 cups spinach, rinsed, coarsely chopped, and packed
1 cup cilantro, coarsely chopped, for garnish
4 ounces feta cheese, crumbled, for garnish
1/3 cup scallions, thinly sliced, for garnish
1 lime, cut into eights, for garnish

*The original recipe called for fresh herbs. If you're making this soup in the summertime, when fresh dill, fennel, and basil are readily available, I would certainly recommend swapping them in—1/3 cup each to replace the dried measurements.

** The original recipe also called for kale in addition to the Swiss chard and spinach. I think you could probably use any combination of winter braising greens you like—the more the merrier—with success.

Bring the barley, 4 cups of the chicken stock, the water, and 1 teaspoon of sea salt to a boil in a large, heavy-bottomed pot. Reduce the heat to low, cover the pot, and leave the barley to simmer for about 45 minutes, or until tender.

Meanwhile, pull out a skillet and heat the butter up over medium-high heat. Add the onions, stirring frequently, and cook for about five minutes. Sprinkle in the herbs, and season with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Continue cooking for about three more minutes, or until the onions are soft and translucent. Deglaze the pan with the wine, cook for a minute or two longer, and turn off the heat. Set the onions aside.

When the barley is tender, add the remaining stock and the onions to the pot. Add the chard and the spinach, and simmer for about six minutes, or until the greens are tender. Season the soup with salt and pepper, and pour it hot into bowls. Put the cilantro, feta, scallions, and lime wedges on the table to use as garnishes. (The cheese doesn't matter too much, and the cilantro and scallions are sort of personal decisions, but whatever you do, don't skip the lime juice. It brings out the flavors of the greens and brightens the barley and the broth.) This soup is good on day one, but even better on day two, so don't be afraid to let it sit.

Saying quite a bit

I don't know about you, but if I see another sticky bun/sugar cookie/apple pie/sugared pecan, I'm going to scream.

On Saturday, I sent my parents and sister home with an extra coffee cake and six sticky buns, and as soon as they left, I packed the rest of it—Mexican wedding cake balls and apple pie and caramels and chocolates—into the freezer, and slammed shut the door. Firmly. It felt very, very good.

Today, I thought it might be nice to talk about Swiss chard for a change. For starters, we just harvested the last of a July row of it from one of our greenhouse beds (the August planting is a little bit wilted, but still holding its own). Also, I convinced Alex to make the Swiss chard gratin from The Art of Simple Food on Christmas Eve, and although he told me halfway through that he thinks following recipes is way too similar to doing high school science experiments, it came out stunningly. In fact, it was one of my favorite dishes on the table that night, which is saying quite a bit. Especially considering it had one of Miss Scarlett's turkeys, a pot of gorgonzola and roasted garlic mashed potatoes, a bowl of sauteed cabbage, another of stuffing, one of creamed onions, a gravy saucer, and a loaf of rye/orange/fennel bread to compete with. Quite a bit, indeed.


The recipe was one I'd been meaning to try for a long time. It was one of those things that sounded homey, and warm, and like you could sit down with a bowl at dinnertime and eat just that. It also sounded like a good way to use up a significant amount of Swiss chard, which considering we'd been plowing through the same row, cutting and watching it spring back, for over five months, was awfully appealing. On Christmas Eve, when Alex made it, we all agreed that the greens were perfect, but that it might be a good idea to cut the breadcrumbs back. And since it was so nice, and disappeared so fast, I made it again this morning with a few tweaks, and we ate it with fried eggs and hot sauce for breakfast. It was even better the second time around.

And it was much, much better than any sweet.


SWISS CHARD GRATIN, with fresh breadcrumbs

adapted from The Art of Simple Food, by Alice Waters

The first time we made this recipe, Alex used fresh chard from the garden. The second time around, I pulled out two bags I had frozen from our garden this summer, and used those. While the fresh chard was maybe just a little bit nicer, I'm not sure I would have noticed that the second batch was made from frozen if I wasn't on the look out. All in all, I think the fact that it was an excellent way to cook frozen Swiss chard more than made up for any slight difference in taste. Whatever you use, I think you'll be pleased.

3 bunches Swiss chard (or, if frozen, roughly 2 cups, drained)
1 and 1/2 cups fresh breadcrumbs
1 tablespoon melted butter
1 tablespoon room temperature butter
2 medium onions, diced
salt to taste
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
3/4 cup milk

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and butter an 8- by 8-inch casserole dish. Wash the chard and chop it into strips. Fill a large pot halfway with water, bring it to a boil, and throw the chard in. Cook the leaves until tender, about 3 minutes, then pour them into a colander to cool. Toss the breadcrumbs and the melted butter together, and spread them on a baking sheet. Bake them for roughly 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until they are crisp and golden brown.

While they bake, squeeze the Swiss chard gently to press out any excess liquid, then set it aside. Then melt the remaining tablespoon of butter in a medium-size pot, and saute the onions for about 5 minutes, or until they are translucent. Add the Swiss chard, season with salt to taste, and continue cooking, stirring occasionally, for roughly 2 minutes. Now sprinkle the flour over top, stir it in, and pour in 1/2 cup of the milk. You want the mixture to be creamy and moist, but there shouldn't be any liquid on the bottom of the pan, so add the remaining milk as needed. Continue cooking for a few minutes longer, tasting and salting as needed.

Spoon the chard into the casserole dish you prepared, spreading it around evenly, and then spreading the breadcrumbs on top. Bake for roughly 20 minutes, or until the gratin is hot and bubbling. Serve the gratin warm, maybe with potatoes and turkey or an over-easy pair of eggs.

Making its debut

My Swiss chard would like to announce that it is very fussy about getting its picture taken, and that it will only pose for someone using crazy 800 speed, neon color film. Here it is, making its cover-shot debut.

Ta daa! It would also like you to know that it is very picky about what touches its skin, and that it is thrilled to have been picked and cleaned and to have the pollen washed off, finally. It was just about at its breaking point with that stuff—spots, rivers, dust, and all. (Here my car and my sinuses would like to chime in, and say that they are feeling a little bit like Winnie the Pooh, walking around all day saying "Tut-tut, feels like rain!" and kind of wishing it would. They are fed up with pollen, too, only there's nothing they can do.)

What my Swiss chard doesn't know is that getting picked usually means the end is near. The warm, hot, buttery end, around here. It's not a bad way to go, but still. It isn't all roses and picket fences on the other side of the yellow dirt.

These days, everything seems to be meeting that sort of end. It all goes the same way: into the big, deep stainless skillet with a big pat of butter over a high blue flame. I've tried to think of more creative burials, but I keep coming back to this one simple preparation. It's a bit repetitive, but really, I don't think it's me.

Spring simply tastes good this way.


Sometimes, I'll add a little garlic and chicken broth in too, especially with Swiss chard. There's something about the Swiss chard juice that asks for it—without a little padding, it tends to kind of squeak around in your mouth, the way spinach and grapefruit salads sometimes do. That's a feeling a little splash of chicken broth can do wonders for.

Otherwise, I don't really like to mess with my Swiss chard too much. It's so simple, so elegant, and so fussy about its looks, that it never seems like a good idea to touch it beyond a bit of heat.

I hope you're enjoying spring, too.

SAUTEED SWISS CHARD

If you have a garden, Swiss chard is one of the easiest greens to grow. It takes a little while to get rolling, but once it starts growing, there will be plenty to go around. There are more tips on growing it over here.

As for this recipe, it's one of my favorites. It's nothing special or complicated, but it makes an excellent noontime snack. I like to eat it with a piece of toast, and maybe a hunk of cheese.

1 tablespoon butter
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 pound Swiss chard, washed and patted dry
1/2 cup chicken broth

Melt the butter in a large sauté pan over medium high heat. Once the butter is melted and the pan is very hot, throw in the garlic and cook it for about 30 seconds, stirring quickly the whole time so it doesn't brown. Turn up the heat to high and immediately pour in half the chicken broth, allowing it to reduce by about half. Turn down the heat to low, add the Swiss chard and the remaining chicken broth, and cover for about a minute. Stir, cover again for about a minute, and serve warm in a bowl with the broth.

Swiss chard

I've always loved Swiss chard—the rainbow of stalks, the thick, leafy greens, and the faint but charming bitterness it lends a cup of soup.

With roots in Sicilian soil, it is surprising the chill it can withstand. It thrives on neglect, spreading in delight down rows of poor, sandy earth where forgotten hands have strewn its seed.

As the weather cools down, the greens lose their edge. The bitter leaves of mid-summer give way to a softer, gentler sort of flavor, imbibing salads and stir-fries with an almost sweet hue.

My favorite lunch this time of year is to cozy up with a bowl of Swiss chard just barely steeped in a broth of pork or chicken stock and a dash of milk. The thin, comforting broth sucked from the marrow of a ham bone fills out with a splash of cream, the two lapping and splashing at the greens until finally they begin to let go. I add a bit of corn, sometimes, or perhaps a sliced onion or the miniature nesting cabbages from the stalk of a brussel sprout. No matter the weather or the tempo of the afternoon, it always makes for a soothing cup.

Yesterday afternoon, cozied up with a mountain of newspaper deadlines and a basket of cream biscuits with jam, I heated up a bowl and settled into the couch to enjoy. Dread gave way to calm, as the well-warmed greens fortified me for the long hours ahead.

STEAMED SWISS CHARD

Serves 1

Boil 3/4 cup pork, chicken, or fish stock. Throw in 1 cup (or more!) of chopped Swiss chard. Other vegetables of your choice (think brussel sprouts, sauteed onions, corn, broccoli, etc.) can also be added. Put a lid on the pot and let the chard steam until just wilted. Add a splash of milk or cream, season with salt and pepper to taste, and enjoy hot.