Chard

This is a blog about flying things, episodic encounters with the artist known in the future as the artist formerly known as Prince, and clinical ponderings of miniature and unlimited scale. On the latter, the bailout failed today. I don’t pretend to know what this means now or moving forward. I’m waiting for the Frontline special, but VH1 will probably get to the instant history first. Banking CEOs will be rock stars in their version. And like rock stars, the banking CEOs will be financially well in the end, at least. They’ll be healthier than former rock stars but they’ll probably also have sex with young women until they die. Actually, VH1 was in the live music business last night with a broadcast from a sold out Boston show of New Kids on the Block. Irony is not dead, but in economic terms it’s in a trickle down stage of devolution, so diluted that its practitioners make it happen on the fly:

A 30-year-old texts her friend, three rows back: OMG, Joey Mac just motioned to me like he was texting me, did you see that! Now I’m texting you back and he probably thinks I’m texting him even though I don’t have his number this is so surreal!!!!!!!!

But let’s go smaller than $700 billion bailouts and stadium shows exhuming dusty rags of irony. Let’s talk about swiss chard. And let’s preface with a nomenclature statement: we prefer to call it chard. We think its both earthier and All-Star with the simpler appellation.

Rocket Prince has had a lot of chard this summer. It’s not his first experience with chard but his experience has been something like a metrician making a statistical breakthrough, except with heart: I see it at the farmer’s market and I go to it, unbidden, excited and intrigued by its stiff, water-repellent leaves and its red, orange, purple, and white stalks. Chard is beautiful, like a one-named model, but much, much better for you.

Of all the attractive leafy yield—calalloo, of which I recently made a savory Caribbean gumbo by the same name, the different generations of Bok Choy, kale, spinach, red and green leaf lettuce—I can’t leave the market without chard.

I started with a simple pan fry of chard, onions, garlic and olive oil. I’d cut out most of the stalk, or rib, questioning myself in process, then regretting on the order of the regret I will always have for once telling my dad between innings of a Little League game that I wish he’d stop yelling to me in the outfield about where I should be positioned, and ease up on the cheering when I got on base. So I stopped cutting the stalks out and lamented the lost ones. Because how can you not include the most colorful part? It just looks healthy, which was reinforced by a small piece in the Times about the most healthy things we aren’t eating enough of. The article said chard has “carotenoid that protects aging eyes.”

I loved the stalks in the stir fry and I was excited about more possibilities, even if the best ingredients require the simplest fabrication. My grandmother used to make ravioli with spinach and meat. I tried the old recipe with chard. Let’s just say Rocket Prince’s sweetie had a that’s-why-I-love-you-moment upon tasting. (Followed up by subsequent moments because I froze the remainder of the yield: chard enhances relationships.) Parmesan in the admixture, which my grandmother bought several times a year in Boston’s North End, brings out the rich gravitas of the chard even more than her spinach did. Saying as much is sacrilege but that’s the thing with chard: you must go with your heart.

My deification has limits, though. I’m not going to waste it with an attempt at, say, chard ice cream: it’s not a good venue regarding my spiritual understanding.

I saved the crimson liquid of the stir fry from the latest round of ravs and have in mind re-heating it as a broth, unadorned, when the winds come brisk from the northeast.

I recently came across another chard lover in Richard Olney, author of Simple French Food. He talks about something I’d already discovered, my aforementioned appreciation of chard ribs, and says that outside of “meridional France,” which I picture to be a café or two outside of Paris, they feed the leafy parts of chard to rabbits and ducks. That’s a food chain I’d want to be a part of. He also mentions that in Nice they replace spinach for chard when making green pasta. And he drops an incredible recipe for chard tarte, which includes olive oil pastry, “shredded chard greens, raisins, pine nuts, grated cheese and sugar, bound with egg.”

I’ll let you know how it goes.

700 million trillion

The tiebreaker question was: How many gallons of water are in the Quabbin Reservoir?

The closest answer would finish in third place. Our foursome coughed up answers ranging from 4,000 gallons – “it just popped in my head” – to way more than that. I pictured the Quabbin, which I flew over as a passenger in a small plane a few years ago. Definitely way more than that. They sank whole towns to make Boston’s water source, which looks like the blemish on M. Gorbachev’s scalp. The blemish times, like, a million trillion.

Our judgment was rushed by the trivia emcee, who wanted to get the tiebreaker over with so he could tell the crowd which team came in second and which team won. We panicked. I knew it must have been a lot more than 4,000 but really I had no idea. None of us did.

The other team was a round table full of women who were knitting. They were calm. It seemed like they had their answer very quickly. They won, though they were not close to right either. I’ve already forgotten the answer but it was in the many millions. I think it might have been in the hundreds of millions. When numbers attached to small things like gallons and those numbers reach into the millions, I simply lose all sense of scale.

In trying to make sense of the proposed Wall Street bailout, I’ve tried to make sense of $700 billion. It seems like an astonishingly high number to give to companies that coaxed people into thinking they could afford things they could not hold, like houses.

If I was Bush, Bernanke, Paulson and the other power brokers involved in this – do you get the sense they were like, eight sounds too close to a trillion and six isn’t enough, let’s call it seven? – I would have put the number out of reach. $700 million trillion. That’s serious. That makes me think, wow, we’re in a lot of trouble. But $700 billion? Come on. There’s probably three times that many gallons of water in Lake Okeechobee.

I should know, I’ve flown over that large body of water, too. It only took like ten minutes to fly over it. But it was a much bigger plane.