Blette combo for an autumn day

It's not always easy to come up with a name for something new, but this one seems natural enough. This week's pannier was piled high with about a dozen huge blette leaves ready to cook. There being no time to waste, Juliette figures why not just chop up the whole lot, the white stems and all, and cook down in a pot with carrots, potatoes, and onion. Such a good idea, say I, and the work is soon done.

Cutting up the blette leaves, so many all at once, was a thrilling experience. But when I got through, I had a five liter cooking pot nearly full of chopped blette, along with the carrots, potatoes, and an onion. There were three varieties of potatoes, which helped give the potato portion of the mix more interest. Lucky for us, local potato growers seem to know what they are doing. Every spud from the Weekly Pannier is proclaimed the best we've ever tasted, and this is no hyperbole. Still, the humble potato, even at its freshest and tastiest still tastes, well, like a potato, so it was good to have the diversity of flavors and textures.

You would think that chopped blette leaves in this quantity would give the soup a dark bitter undertone, but such was not the case. Yes, there was a definite flavor of cooked greens, but subtle. I recalled my childhood experiences with turnip greens, which are probably the bitterest greens around. My relatives with roots in the South cooked turnip greens in a pot with fatty chunks of pork. The resulting mess was so bitter to my highly sensitive taste buds (a characteristic inherited from my French ancestors) that I would gag on even the smallest morsel that I could force past my lips. After a few episodes of turnip refusal, my mother didn't force the issue and let me watch the rest of the family smack their lips and tease me for being a turnip greens wimp. My God, they even soaked their corn bread in the potlikker and thus ruined the only food my mother ever cooked properly.

more to come