It's not easy being green

It appears that I am experiencing a glut. The Great Silverbeet Glut of 2010. Even after the snails and slugs have been on the rampage, I have enough here to feed a Greek village on spanakopita for months. Trouble is, I tend to treat the garden like a pantry. I leave it out there until I need it. Can't foresee needing that much silverbeet in the near future. My practical friend K suggested I bring it in, wash it, chop it finely and freeze it. It's an excellent idea. If one had the freezer space for that much silverbeet.

I blame Masterchef. Was a time when a vegetable was a Vegetable. Now it's an Ingredient. I've made quiche, spanakopita, pie, lamb/spinach curry. I've added it to pasta sauce, dahl, and salad. At no point have I boiled it up and plonked it on a plate with a sausage, some carrots and mashed potatoes. That's how people used to eat it. As a vegetable.

Then again, those same people also ate a lot of chokoes. Steamed chokoes, boiled chokoes, baked chokoes. Choko chips, choko chutney... Did your parents have a choko vine? Dad's was the wonder of the street. It intertwined along the palings of the back fence, obscene in its fecundity. Obscene to me, anyway. I never liked chokoes. No matter what my parents did with them.

Sisters B and C felt much the same way about silverbeet. No matter what my parents did with it.

Any suggestions on useful things to do with silverbeet will be gratefully accepted. I need to move it along before the rhubarb problem rears its ugly head again.

PS: I, ahem, borrowed the artful silverbeet image, artfully named 'Wet Silverbeet', from Garden Amateur, the fab blog by my friend Jamie, devoted to all things garden. Is well worth a read - he's actually a total pro and would never end up with way too much silverbeet...