Bright Lights!

Bright Lights!

(c) Dorine Houston 2008, all rights reserved

Brilliant Crayola red with hints of dancing purple ancestors in its glorious hue!  Sunshine yellow joy a dancing partner! 

Atop, deep green leaves.  Bright lights Swiss chard!  It is so beautiful!  Some of us have been eating Swiss chard for years and embraced the colorful bright lights when the strain appeared a few years ago.  All that color has to bespeak a rich mine of antioxidants.  Many others are encountering this beautiful vegetable for the first time this year in their CS boxes and wonder how to prepare it. 

The other day I was trimming off the leaves to blanch, chiffonade and toss with some diced peppers into a chickpea salad.  The stems began looking more and more like brilliantly colored celery stalks to me.  Why not use chard stalks the same way as celery?  Time for a tasting binge. 

Bright lights stalks, just like celery, taste good when filled with peanut butter, cream cheese or fresh goat cheese.  They look very pretty sliced into chicken salad--so why not in tuna salad, too?  Strips of celery look, well, white on a crudités tray.  Strips of bright lights stalks look gloriously red and yellow, and taste wonderful with dip.  In a brown bag lunch, dancing red and yellow look more appealing than green-tinted white in the sandwich bag filled with veggies. 

Meanwhile, use the leaves in any way that works for spinach.  Use the largest leaves to wrap around any filling that would usually go inside cabbage or ravioli/wonton wrappers. 
Use the leaves instead of lettuce in a sandwich or wrap. 

There is no such thing as too much bright lights--in the big city or in the big country!