Garden Chard Pasta
The essential meal for the overzealous chard grower. (Serves 3 comfy, 4 with dessert, or 2 hungry carb loaders.)
The List
8 oz bow tie pasta
12-16oz mushrooms: mix between wild and store bought. Cremini, shiitake, oysters, chanterelles etc. Choose your own blend or what’s in the fridge.
6 cloves garlic, minced
6 tbsp of good butter (4 tbsp browned and set aside, 2 tbsp cold)
1 bunch Swiss chard (about 8-10 big leaves), stems removed and leafy bits torn
3.5-ish c. homemade chicken or vegetable stock
Salt/pepper to taste
1 c. grated parm (1/2 mix in pasta, 1/2 to use as topping)
The Beta
In a Dutch oven, brown 4 tbsp. butter and set aside (about five minutes).
Add remaining butter (2 tbsp.) and sauté mushrooms and garlic until soft. Add pasta, 2 cups of stock, salt and pepper, and then cover. Check and stir every few minutes. Keep adding stock until pasta is rehydrated & cooked through.
Just before the pasta is al dente, add chard and cook down for 1-2 minutes. Once stock is absorbed and chard is soft, remove from heat. Sir in 1/2 cup of parmesan and add salt and pepper to taste. Add additional parm during plating.
We love a good recipe.
I can’t know for certain, but I’m almost positive this was the first dish Tommy ever cooked for me. I remember almost nothing about that evening, a record presumably turning, Tom’s house overflowing in every corner with house plants I’d never heard over before they ever started trending on Instagram (do houseplants still trend?). All I knew was this guy was a lot cooler than I was, and the food on my plate was far better than anything I’d cook in my own kitchen.
A little insight into how Tommy and I cook now—something we talked about recently when I asked him what he thought someone like Gordon Ramsey (or insert some other celebrity chef) would think about our cooking. He said he thought they’d think the food was good enough, but simple and not very creative in comparison to what, you know, actual chefs are turning out on $200 plates. More than anything, we enjoy cooking over hot fires, outside, preferably with a cold beer in hand and good company at the ready. Rarely do we reach for more than half a dozen or so ingredients (salt, pepper, and olive oil notwithstanding), and seldom do we spend longer than an hour or two bringing a meal to the table; our hungrier friends may disagree on that last point (You can’t count the fire building!). We cook simply and enjoyably, rarely following a recipe, and employ a few handy tricks that can be applied to any meal.
Hear this though: Not following a recipe doesn’t make you cool. I’d rather eat the Pinterest recipe meal from someone hell bent on making something tasty for their friends than sit around pretending the food is good just because you call yourself creative in the kitchen. It should only take you a few lame meals to crack open a cookbook or start watching some Kenji López-Alt videos so you can figure out how to get better in the kitchen. I tried for too long to go it alone (and in the age of the internet?!), and as it turns out, cooking great meals can be pretty simple. To break rules, you first have to know them. And some rules, like not using comma splices, should never be broken at all.
Grammar jokes and silly soapboxes behind us, let’s get to the meat of this recipe, that being the recipe itself (this recipe has no meat as you surely noticed up top). The first time Tommy cooked this for me, he was using a…RECIPE! Dun dun dun… As most Swiss chard gardeners are prone to, Tommy came to the end of a bountiful harvest with no idea what to do with his heaps of beautiful leaves. He found this recipe from a forgotten source, continued to grow endless amounts of beautiful chard, and the rest is…well you know.
We recently returned to this recipe after harvesting another pile—yes, an actual pile—of chard from Tom’s garden. I cut the plants down myself, and I totally understand why you might grow it without even knowing what to do with it. It’s just so darn pretty! After recreating this pasta from memory and enjoying it alongside homegrown lettuce and a bottle of red wine (any will do), we’re happy to include it for your enjoyment here. And so we can look back in a few weeks and make it again for ourselves!
