Asian Swiss Chard with Shrimp

One of the ingredients I was most excited to get this week was rainbow chard.  I love how colorful rainbow chard is, and compared to other greens such as collards or kale, chard cooks super quickly and the stems are great to eat.  Just cut the stems off of the leaves, chop the stems, and cut the leaves into 1 inch ribbons.

Th recipe is based on a Martha Stewart recipe for swiss chard.  I cooked about a pound of shrimp first - pulled off the tails, seasoned with salt and pepper, and cooked on high heat with a little peanut oil.  I then removed them from the heat and set aside.

I minced 2 cloves of garlic, a thumb-sized piece of ginger, and a CSA spring onion.  Finally, against my better judgment, I cut a jalapeno into rings (and didn't really separate out the seeds...more on this later).  I sauteed the aromatics in about a tablespoon of peanut oil (which I like for asian cooking) for about 30 seconds on medium high heat, at which point I added the chopped chard stems.  I love cooking with chiles, and I love hot food.  But let me tell you, if you don't remove the seeds from the peppers, you'll be somewhat uncomfortable.  It wasn't so much my eyes as my lungs - I was coughing entirely too much while the aromatics cooked.  Anyway, if you make this recipe (or anything with hot peppers), it will be much smoother sailing if you just use the flesh of the peppers and not the stems/seeds.

At this point, just cook until the chard is tender but not soft.  Add the chard leaves, and cook until slightly wilted.  Then, add the cooked shrimp, and if you're so inclined, a tablespoon or so of hoisin sauce.  Stir until evenly coated and the shrimp is warm.

Everything was cooked well; cooking the shrimp separately first, and then adding the chard stems before leaves allows you the chance to cook everything to the doneness required of each ingredient.  The final produce ended up too spicy and too saucy.  If I could do this over again, I would have gone a totally different direction; just spring onion and a little garlic for aromatics, and I would have used a little lemon or lime juice instead of the hoisin.  Meghan, who can eat most hot salsas without any problems, didn't have more than a bite or two of this dish.  It really does boil down to the seeds - I've made a similar dish with probably twice as much hot pepper which had just been stemmed and seeded.

Here's the final product, served with some caramelized onion quinoa and topped with the green parts of some CSA spring onions:

Fresh lime juice squeezed on at the end cooled of some of the burn, but not enough really.  Oh well, I guess you can't win 'em all (as the USA soccer team showed us yesterday)... I just hope we get more chard.