Sauteed Chard with Butter and Parmesan

Beautiful chard!  And it is amazing what a little butter and parmesan can do to it!

Wardah from GNOWFGLINS has offered a challenge to blog about cooking seasonally and this week the focus is chard.  So the following is my very simple recipe for Sauteed Chard with Butter and Parmesan.

If you are new to cooking seasonally, you may also be new to chard.  This recipe is difficult to mess up and the taste will bring chard back into your kitchen again and again.


First, I separate the leaves from the stems.  The stems I save for another recipe.

I boil the leaves in heavily salted water for about 4 minutes until they are tender.

While it is boiling, I grate up a handful of parmesan cheese.

After the chard has wilted and become tender, I drain it and then let it cool enough to chop it.

Then, I melt about 3 tablespoons of butter in a cast iron skillet.  I add the chard and sauté until it is warmed through and I then toss in the parmesan.

This chard recipe is absolutely delicious.  As you can see from the picture, one bunch does not make a huge amount, but this is easily doubled or tripled.

Ingredients:

1 bunch of chard

salt

3 tbsp. butter

handful of grated parmesan

Directions:

Remove stems from chard and reserve for another recipe.

Boil the leaves in a large pot of heavily salted water for about 4 minutes or until wilted and tender.

Drain the leaves and cool, then coarsely chop.

In a medium skillet melt 3 tablespoons of butter.

Add the wilted chard leaves and heat through.

Toss with a handful of parmesan cheese.

Enjoy!

This post is part of GNOWFGLINS Seasonal Recipe Round-Up

What is NOT real food?

In case you are new to real food and don't quite understand what it is, let me begin by telling you what it is not.

• If a fifth grader could not pronounce the ingredients or it has more than five ingredients, then the product probably is NOT real food.
• Look at the labels on some of the products that you regularly purchase.  Here are the ingredients for Utz Sour Cream and Onion Potato Chips.  How many would a fifth grader not be able to pronounce?  What ARE those things that you would be putting into your body?


• Potatoes, Cottonseed Oil, Dehydrated Whey, Dextrose, Salt, Shortening Powder (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Corn Syrup Solids, Sodium Caseinate (Milk Derivative)), Dehydrated Sour Cream (Sour Cream (Cream, Nonfat Milk, Cultures), Cultured Nonfat Milk.


• Refined sugars are NOT real food.  This includes white sugar, cane juice, corn syrup, and any artificial sweeteners.  There are some wonderful real food alternatives to using refined sugars in cooking.  


• Refined grains are NOT real food.  This includes white flour and white rice.  Items that you buy that contain flour must state whole wheat, not just wheat.


• CAFO produced meats and eggs are NOT real food.  

Florida chicken CAFO

• If you don't know what a CAFO is, it's time you found out! CAFO stands for Confined Animal Feeding Operation.  As you can see from the photo, CAFOs are more of a factory than a farm.  Not only is too much manure concentrated into one area which leads to the necessity of using antibiotics, but to increase and quicken weight gain, the animals are fed growth hormones, some of which are genetically modified.


• Foods that don't eventually rot are NOT real food.

• When I first began going to my wellness doctor, he had a loaf of white bread on the counter where I checked out.  Next to it was a sheet of paper tallying how many weeks it had been sitting there.  I remember looking at it at 8 weeks and it still looked the same!  It never rotted.  The bugs and organisms that cause decay wouldn't even eat it!

Switching to a real food diet can be difficult for some people.  Knowing where to start by knowing what to avoid can make the transition a little smoother.

This post is part of Food Renegade's Fight Back Friday.