Kitchen Misadventures: Stuffed Peppers and Chard

So if you read my first post you are aware that all of a sudden I found myself with a lot of vegetables and no idea how to use most of them. It should be noted that after a misguided attempt at doing the Atkins diet for a week to jump start some weight loss (I lasted 5 days) I also had a couple of peppers, an avocado and a LOT of baby spinach in the refrigerator just begging to be put to good use.

I had a few friends over on a Sunday a couple of weeks ago for some early birthday shenanigans. We cooked out on the grill and I made a pretty spinach salad with strawberries, walnuts, and Brianna's Poppy Seed Dressing. Spinach and CSA strawberries, check!

My first real attempt at cooking some of these veggies was to make stuffed peppers and chard. I usually use recipes I find in Google searches, YouTube videos, Goop newsletters, Cooking Light magazine, or whatever Yee or Michelle has mentioned about how they cook particular dishes. The chard was a Yee recipe, the stuffed peppers recipe I used can be found here: was a YouTube video that I can no longer locate (I swear I'll do better at this documentation bit next time).

I'm going to make a long story short here and say that the stuffed peppers, while looking very nice and sounding like they would taste good from the list of ingredients, were kind of meh. The sauce was pretty ketchupy, actually reminding me a lot of the special sauce at Steak 'n Shake (what up Mid-Westerners!). The mixture inside and the peppers themselves were edible but just kind of bland. The recipe didn't call for any of the sauce to be mixed in with the stuffing, which I think was a mistake. Next time I'll try a different recipe, hopefully something with a little more punch. Still, peppers and CSA onions, check!

Yee's chard recipe went like so:

1. Wash the chard thoroughly. 
2. Make a fist and run the stem through it, grabbing the leaves as you pull the stem through. The leaves come right off! (This worked really well.)
3. Warm some olive oil in a skillet, a couple of tablespoons for a big bunch of chard.
4.  Tear the chard up into smaller pieces and drop into the skillet. 
5. Season with salt and pepper. If you like, throw a strip of bacon in for added flavor.
6. Sauté until greens are cooked.
7. Drizzle a little vinegar on top when serving. 

So I did all this and had two major reactions. The first, chard is pretty! Until you cook it that is, then it just looks kind of gross. Second, cooked chard with vinegar on top tastes a lot like cooked spinach, of which I am not a fan. It probably goes without saying that I didn't really like the chard. Oh well, at least I tried! CSA chard, check!

Apologies for the horrible photography. I promise that too will get better as we go.