Enjoying the season

With a summer as dry and as populated with rabbits as ours has been, the existence of fresh vegetables in our garden is a bit of a miracle.  But we have chard...beautiful chard...in abundance.  We've enjoyed making up new recipes to include this vitamin filled vegetable in our meals.

Below is a stack of four leaves of chard.

 To use chard, I cut out the center rib and slice it thinly as you would celery.  The rest of the leaves get cut into small pieces as you would spinach.  Below is the same chard ready for cooking.

 For this particular dish we kept it pretty simple.  I diced a slightly frozen skinless chicken thigh and sauteed it in oil with salt and pepper.  Then I removed it from the pan and sauteed the sliced ribs from the chard leaves, again salting lightly.  When they were transluscent, I added the cut leaves and lightly salted them, stirring and frying until they were deep green and tender.  Then the chicken went back in along with a large handful of sliced almonds.  The cooking time is a total of 10-15 minutes, if you don't count the time it took to pick, wash and chop.  Here is the result.

I was a bit worried about whether Chuck would like it, but his assessment was, "This is really really good!"

Since then we made another sauteed skillet meal with chard.  It included sliced onions, chopped up leftover French fries from Five Guys, a small amount of diced ham, the chard, and eight beaten eggs, added in that order.  When the eggs were cooked through we added grated cheese to the top, put the lid on and let it melt.  With only two of us at home, and both of us light eaters, that was enough for two meals.  We will fix that again, although we will have to find a substitute for the Five Guys French fries.

It's just a bit early for sunflowers, but this has been the summer for things to be early.  We enjoyed these sunflowers picked from the ditch mixed with salvia from the plants my parents gave me.

I didn't really title this post about gratitude, but noticing and enjoying flavors and colors is a big part of gratitude for me!