know your vegetables

when we went to to the farmer's market last week between the heirloom tomatoes and the apricots i was just mooning over color and texture and didn't have much of a gameplan other than letting owen pick some vegetables. he always picks broccoli, which is good--but one can only eat so much broccoli. so we picked swiss chard, or at least i thought it was swiss chard. and of course he picked the purple one which of course i would have done too. we really swooned over this swiss chard. in fact we even had a photo shoot with the leaves (yup owen's wearing a toolbelt--he was quite proud of putting that on himself):

the thing is, i don't know much about greens. i'm a big fan of spinach in my omelettes and i buy that big bag of happy greens from trader joe's to add to my minestrone for a chock-full-of-goodness finish but that's about it. we had finished the broccoli and discovered eating carrots "bugs bunny style" (although that reference means nothing to owen) was much tastier than little chewing on little twigs. . . so the chard had been sitting in the crisper and in a panic i grabbed it without much thought and while cooking up the tricolor pasta owen had chosen (again, pretty purple and green pasta) tossed it in my iron skillet with some olive oil, squeezed a lemon (in retrospect, my big mistake perhaps?)and at the end threw in some pasta water to let it simmer a bit. . .

now i had bought some real slabs of bacon from the marbella butcher thinking i'd do a proper greens (you know, i'd heard about that kind of thing in southern folklore) but i had this avocado and tomato so i had to make a BLAT sandwich with it instead. anyway, it was bitter and soggy and just all around icky--and i tossed it all in the sink. i wondered if i had leached some kind of poison--you know, like you'd get if you ate tomato vines or raw rhubarb. and then i wondered if i had bought swiss chard at all. so this morning i looked it up chard on wiki and it looks like we bought red chard, kind of. anyhow, all this to say--know your vegetables. or at least consult your joy of cooking or bitman or martha. . . .

no, i think what i want to say is that some days we take burgundy tomatoes and slice them with buffalo mozerella then drizzle them with blood orange olive oil and top it all off with some purple basil then sandwich it with some toasty crusty wheatseed bread and of course it's delish. it's predictably simple and satisfying. and nobby, dirty carrots with long green stems you snap off are tasty just scrubbed right out of the sink. but there are greens that look perfectly like purple trees and lemon persian cucumbers that have been just waiting their turn behind broccoli. . .