Chard Week at the Fishbands

We received a warning note from the Condo Board this week about our 'guerrilla garden', indicating that we had a month to remove the plants (including our very good-looking chard, which could practically be considered a decorative plant), or they would be pulled up for us.  Jon had already pulled up the tomato plants at my urging, because they were hardly producing anything and an eyesore anyhow.

This inspired a week long chard-centric menu in the Fishband household (a combination of our two last names, in case you were wondering).  First up was Color Me Vegan's Swiss Chard Tart.  Jon kindly made this solo while I recovered from filming the Rosslyn Jazz Fest a little too soon after surviving a killer cold.  He made two modifications.  The first was he didn't add any oil to the cashew cheese portion of the recipe.  He didn't replace it with anything - just omitted it.  The second was he didn't add as much salt as the recipe called for and it was still plenty salty.


          Doesn't this look like quiche made with eggs?

It turned out really well.  The texture is much more like a fluffy eggy-style quiche than my favorite vegan quiche recipe from Voluptuous Vegan (dang, that is a good quiche though!).  It wasn't overly chardy, which is helpful because we have to eat it every meal this week - best not to get sick of it too soon.  We'll also be eating Vegan Yum-Yum's Cheezy Chard toast points (so incredibly good, you should make those), and some chickpea crepes from VegNews that we'll sneak some chard into.  So no recipes anytime soon.

I did "invent" a soup recipe last week to help with my cold, which was 4 cloves garlic, 1 onion, 3 small sweet potatoes, a bunch of collards, and about 2-3 cups okra, plus 3-4 TBS of berbere spice mix, but the problem  is that, while tasty, the okra unfortunately gives it the look of goopy boogers when you scoop it into your bowl, so I can't wholeheartedly endorse that recipe due to its visually disturbing nature.

I am now a full time graduate student which I naively thought would give me loads of time to experiment in the kitchen.  However, so far I've been spending a lot of time reading textbooks and course materials, working on homework, and attending class.  Hopefully once I get my routine down I can spend more time having fun with new recipes.  I'm especially excited about making Miyoko Schinner's vegan cheeses.  I'm not sure if anyone else fell of their chair when they noticed, but Lauren Ulm of Vegan Yum Yum fame is back blogging again!  I was really pleased, her blog is such a pleasure to read and to look at.