Veggie Tales -- Swiss Chard

 I am not a huge vegetable fan especially leafy green ones. I stick to the basic veggies: Carrots, green beans, corn, peas, cucumber, radishes, and shredded lettuce. I hate tomatoes, broccoli, and cauliflower -- the later two I can tolerate if they are raw. If put in front of me and challenged, I will at least try most things. However, I am not going out of my way to eat my veggies.

When I went to the cooking club at the library, we were nearly forced to take some vegetables from the community garden. I snipped some parsley and a little kale. I stayed far from the Swiss chard.. it looked too much like Rhubarb. However, the librarian pretty much insisted that I take swiss chard. I figured I'd mix it with the kale for a salad. I was told it was better cooked. Cooked?? Um.. not so much.

When I got home, I started looking for Swiss Chard recipes on Pinterest. I found a lot of recipes for cooked swiss chard. I found a recipe for pasta, sausage, and swiss chard. Since I had to fend for myself this week and had some kielbasa in the freezer, I figured I would make this instead of sauerkraut casserole.

Fast forward to Thursday. I went to make dinner. First I chopped the swiss chard The stem into bite size pieces and rolled the leaves and then sliced them into pieces.

Then I read the recipe and ran into an issue. I had no tomato paste. Okay no problem, I will just skip it. As I kept reading, I thought the broth won't work without the tomato paste. Time to improvise.

After cooking the sausage and swiss chard, I decided to add some lemon juice since I heard that lemon and swiss chard went well together. I was slightly worried about the lemon and kielbasa but I figured I'd worry about that later. I also added the red pepper flakes and garlic from the original recipe along with lemon pepper seasoning.

Once the pasta and sausage was done, I mixed the sausage and swiss chard mixture into the pasta.

Then I sprinkled it with the parmesan cheese and dug in.

It was amazing. Because I diced the swiss chard small, it was not really noticeable. I only used 1 swiss chard leaf so that might be part of why I didn't really taste it. 

 I will definitely make it again. Maybe I will even make the real recipe. I just have to get some swiss chard.