Smooth Bird

Last weekend we went for a swim at a lake in a hill town. Blueberry bushes ring the lake. It was a beautious maximus afternoon. We cooled off, watched a tireless dog swim to and fetch a ball thrown in the water over and over, compared and contrasted our feet while sitting on a wooden dock, and caught sight of an enormous bird, probably a heron but it looked like a pterodactyl, swoop about the edges of the lake, no doubt for the blueberries because herons aren’t bird brains – they know where to find the antioxidants.

On the way back from the lake we saw road signs for corn. We pulled off at one to find an old flat bed truck, veggies in coolers, baskets and crates on or about the truck, and a kind of roof contrived to shade the bounty. A sign said to put money in a hanging bird box.

We bought a huge bunch of basil, swiss chard, a dozen ears of corn, beets, and incredible white onions. They smell so sweet.

Recently I came across a list of the eleven best foods you aren’t eating. Blueberries, beets and swiss chard make the list. My mother used to make stuffed zucchini around this time of year, with zukes from the garden. (She also used to make zucchini flower pancakes.) The main ingredient in the stuffed zucchini stuffing, aside from squash pulp itself, is swiss chard. It brings strong character to the stuffing, as if it’s the family member who most specifically captures the mores, triumphs and flaws of the unit, extending across generations. The crazy uncle, maybe. Swiss chard is why you love your family. And it’s good for you.

Well, we boiled the beets for a salad, in which we Frenched and added one of the sweet onions. The beet water couldn’t be wasted. I decided on two purposes. I would cook rice pasta in it and I would add some to the chard that I’d already rinsed and chopped and had cooking with garlic and olive oil. See, we’d sketched a menu using the veggies from the truck stand. I was to use the chard as main ingredient in ravioli.

I added about a cup of the beet juice to the simmering chard and let it cook mostly off. The result was a hearty braise whose taste alone is a little too sharp but when complemented with parm, ground beef and pork and a conservative application of ricotta, the admixture should make for supreme ravioli the likes of which my grandmother might be proud (her famous ravs were spinach, parm and meat-filled, no ricotta).

I love to cook. I love to swim. I love fresh vegetables of high summer and lakeside blueberry bushes you can swim right up to. I’d love to glide down to them in sweeping arcs, too.