One of my goals with my garden this year is to use the gardening experience to get my kids excited about eating green leafy vegetables.
They helped me select the seedlings, prepare the soil, and set the plants. They’ve helped me with the watering and have been excited to check the progress of growth. So far so good, even if my son called gardening a “chore” this weekend, when I asked who wanted to help me plant a few latecomers in my herb garden.
Not a chore, I corrected him, a privilege. We get to help start new life and watch it grow. We are so lucky! And then we get to eat it!
I noticed my plot of rainbow chard was shining brilliantly so I decided we must harvest our first chard leaves for dinner that night.
I stripped the leaves from the stems and minced the stems separately. I rough chopped the leaves and set them aside.
I heated up some olive oil mixed with some macadamia nut oil (why not? I have it and it adds a little bit of a nutty flavor) in a deep skillet and sauteed the stems with 3 cloves of minced garlic. After a few minutes, I added some thickly sliced baby portobello mushrooms. Then, toward the end, I tossed in the chopped chard leaves and grated some fresh nutmeg and then some Parmesan cheese into it all.
I served it topped with more Parmesan alongside an easy entree of Ian’s Fish Sticks, which I like because they don’t have any fillers or other artificial stuff. I cooked them on the back patio in my large toaster oven.
The whole meal was a delicious end to a hot summer day. And the kids ate the chard, which thrilled me!
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