The Weekly Pannier, November 21

This week's pannier once again gives us quite a variety of fruits and vegetables, most of them grown locally, all of them organic/bio, including: eggs, lettuce, chard (blette), curly cabbage, parsley, carrots, parsnips, potatoes, pears, apples, and clementines. Nothing from the squash family this time, but that's okay. We found a spaghetti squash at the bio/organic market in Claira the other day and prepared our first dish with it yesterday. A recipe from that experiment will appear shortly.

A word about one of the new items in the basket: blette, which is known in English as chard. We've become so accustomed to calling it by the local name that "chard" sounds almost exotic, so we'll stick with blette. It's an ancient food in Europe, known to the Romans and was even singled out in the writings of Pliny the Elder. The vegetable pie called Tourte de Blette, is one of the most famous uses of the leaves, but we'll probably not bake a Chard Tart, having given up on glutenous baked goods (except for bread made with epautre (spelt in English), flour. The leaves can be chopped and sauteed for use in a variety of ways, including omelets, or just as a side dish with a main course.

As for the parsnips, the last time I cooked with parsnips was when I was still a roving lad, footloose in America, and took a dare to cook an Irish Stew from scratch. I knew nothing about the cuisine of Erin in those days, but I bravely took the challenge -- and even baked some Irish soda bread to go with it. The meal was quite delicious, as I recall, but that's another story. Whatever Juliette and I do with the parsnips, it will not include mutton or any other meat, of course, since we've grown quite used to eating meatless.