Swiss Chard Rolls Recipe

This transcription will have some mistakes because it is partially automated.

Hello and welcome to Freshly Served the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we are going to make some quinoa stuff chard rolls which is I started out thinking of what I can do with these beautifully massive leaves that Phil and I got from our garden which are not actually chard if you’re wondering why the stem isn’t red like a chard, this is actually silverbeet.

It’s a relative of chard. All of the beet family are relative that’s why if you see beets that have the green still attach in the store, they look remarkably similar to chard because they’re the same family.

So, what were gonna do is take those leaves, were gonna make a delicious stuffing with quinoa and a bunch of vegetables and some tamari and all that nice stuff and were gonna stuff those chard leaves, here’s silverbeet leaves in my case and then were going to bake them which I find these leaves are a lot easier to work with than cabbage.

Cabbage you have to blanch first and it’s really difficult to peel it off without breaking it I find so anyway so that’s what were gonna do today and what I’ve got to start is I got my quinoa, it looks like it’s about done back here.

Yup! So quinoa again is two cups water to one cup quinoa and you want a little bit of salt in the water to help the cooking process. You turned it up to high, get it boiling and then turned it down to simmer and let it simmer for about half an hour and then your qunioa should be nice and light and fluffy. If it’s sticky you might have put in too much water or it may just need to cook a little bit longer.

So there’s that and then what were gonna do is get our sauce going and I just want a little bit of flavor for this stuff in the centre because it’s basically gonna be all vegetables with some quinoa.

So what I’m going to do to start is put some tamari in here and this going to be a bowl big enough for my quinoa and for my vegetables so that I don’t have to use two bowls. Tamari is like soy sauce, it’s just the kind I get is a naturally fermented tamari as suppose to soy sauce which isn’t always fermented when you buy them at store.

The reason that’s its important is that fermenting breakdown the part of the soy that is indigestible so it makes it a lot easier on your system.

Ok! This is some untoasted sesame oil and I like to use this when I’m using the toasted variety of the sesame oil and the toasted you can see is what darker than the untoasted.

I like to combine these two together because they’re from the same seed but if you don’t have untoasted sesame oil you can just use olive oil or whatever there are around with little flavor that you have.

So those three are in the bowl and then comes the fun part were we are going to grate some ginger and I’m gonna cut a nice big chunk of ginger and then I’ll get my ginger grater out which is a little bit different from a regular grater. It does not have holes going through it, it just has teeth on the front so what happens is when I grate the ginger, it doesn’t fall through and it just make like a ginger mush.

So, this is where the magic happen, were gonna get (Oh! Lost some) gonna get all the ginger together, all of these pulp that we’ve just grated is gonna stick right to a pulp but that was kind of insinuated in the pulp.

Ok, so you get it all together in a bowl like so and when I squeeze it watch what’s going to happen.

Oh! Yeah! That is the juice of the ginger. The younger ginger you can find the more juice is gonna come out and that juice has delicious ginger flavor without so much of that bite that you get from the whole ginger and that’s gonna go right in with our tamari and our two oils.

Nice flavosr going on in this bowl, what were gonna add to it are our vegetables. So I’ve got carrots, zucchini and broccoli. Just get these chopped up as finely as you can with the carrots and the zucchini I’m gonna grate them even though I hate grating.

Lot of grating today with the ginger and vegetables but it makes it very nice and small pieces, soft to chew, really nice and the broccoli I’m just gonna chopped up as finely as I can and green onions or I’m actually used some chard today, I mean some chives – just thinking about rapping that we actually got from the garden the other day and this little flower is about to bloom and some parsley.

So chopped them up as finely as you can, throw them in the bowl. Checked out that bowl of vegetables! That looks delicious, now I’m mixing the vegetables together into that bit of sauce that we’ve made at the bottom here.

I mix the vegetables in with the flavoring first before adding the quinoa because the quinoa is just gonna suck that flavor right up. So better to get it around the vegetables first coz they don’t suck them up as much.

And then add the quinoa and the vegetables can get the dressing around the quinoa. No need to add salt here because we’ve got the tamari or the soy sauce which does have quite a bit of salt in it already.

And there’s the quinoa for those of you who haven’t seen it before, it’s a very small grain. It’s really beautiful when it cooks because it gets this little spiral as the grain opens up. If you don’t have quinoa, you can’t find quinoa you can just use rice or whatever other type of grain you like. Get that stirred around in here.

That inner stem, so that it would look like that and then it’s gonna wrap up nice and easily. Now you can blanch this as well if you really want to. Blanching is where you get boiling hot water, you drop the leaf in for about 10 seconds and then you take it out and put it in some ice water.

I don’t often do that just because I can’t be bothered. It will make the leaf quite a bit softer so that it will roll easier but this is the reason that I’m using silverbeet over the chard is it rolls really nicely without having to blanch it.

So what your gonna do, fold in the ends and this one has these nice big sides and then make sure nothing falls out just squeeze it in right that, roll it over (Oh! Mine burst.) That’s ok. No shame in that.

And then what your gonna do is put this in an oven cooked dish that has a lid and mine’s actually a round one which isn’t the best but work with what you’ve got and I’m gonna stuck mine I think.

Alright, let’s see if we can make a newer one this time. So fold in the ends, I’m gonna be conscious with this guy and make it into a nice little pocket. Now usually when stuff burst like my first one is because I put too much filling in.

I get a little bit over excited about having so much yumminest inside these leaves that I’ve stuff them too full. See if we can get this one to stay together. Now when it bakes it will be a lot softer or if you blanch it. So there we go.

Round is not the best shape for this cause but since it’s the only baking dish that I got with a lid that’s what I’m going to use.

The reason that I’m going t put the lid on is because otherwise the leaves will dry out. Ok! And I’m not putting any kind of sauce over the leaves because the juices from the vegetables inside the leaves are going to create quite a bit of juice.

Now I’m actually not baking these right now coz I’m going to take these over a friend and bake it there but when you put it in the oven, gonna go I don’t know, between 300F – 350F, not too high and somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes and you should have a nice, soft chard roll.

Hope you enjoyed it. You can find the recipe at HealthyVeganRecipes.net. I’m Heather and this is Freshly Served.