Posted by Loulou on Apr 9, 2014 | 0 comments

HEY, those aren’t Swiss chard!!!

As I may have mentioned before, our neighbor grows some pretty snappy vegetables and today, our lucky day, he just happened to decide to cut his Swiss chard, blette in French, which sounds a bit like ‘bless’ and so his Swiss chard is sort of a blessing for our kitchen.  Not to mention that you can freeze it after steaming it in salted water and draining it well.

I know this because mama does that with spinach and any sort of greens and even I eat green things in my kitty food.  One of my foods has green beans, haricots verts, mixed in with the tuna and another has carrots combined with whitefish, so I eat pretty well around here.

But I’m not sure about the Swiss chard and spinach.  The French do great things with both in that they make a bechamel sauce and spoon it over all kinds of vegetables, especially those little endives that come in white or red.  You just slice up nice vegetables and put them in a baking dish and spoon a bit of bechamel over the top and grate some cheese (hey—Swiss cheese for the Swiss chard, haha) over the whole shootin’ match and bake in the oven for 20 minutes or so.

Mama’s bechamel also finds its way to my dish, just a tiny bit, of course, but oh, boy, do I love it.  What’s not to like with rich milk or half and half poured into a butter and flour roux?  And then mama adds an egg yolk to really liven up the sauce, but the yolk is not necessary.  What is necessary is a bit of nutmeg, which I love.  That may not sound very kittylike but nutmeg drives me nuts, haha.

So I have to go help mama stir the sauce for her endive right now while she does other things like peel fresh shrimp for the remoulade sauce and boil fresh corn to go with the neighbor’s bounty.

Something tells me that it’s going to be a real southern dinner around here tonight.

I just wish we were having catfish, too…

No, this is not catfish nor is it Swiss chard.  It’s mama’s Mojito Border!!! And it was MINT to be, haha…