Making Dolmas: What to do with too Much Chard

If you plant kale or chard, you know you will always produce more than you need, your friends need and your family needs. But if you have to buy wither in a grocery store, they ask for a princely sum. Something is wrong the the supply and demand side of this formula.

Anyway, the following gives a general recipe for how to make dolmas. If you don't grow your own chard or kale, find a local grower/seller or make friends with a gardener.

Pictured below is my very large colander full of kale, chard, herbs, onions and celery straight from the garden.

To make the dolmas, I cut celery, onion, mint, oregano and dill very finely and then mix it with a pound or two of ground meat.

Finer than this even...
Then I blanche the chard or kale in boiling water and then cool it in ice water. The ice always melts half way through and it doesn't change the the success of the recipe so don't worry about it. Once the leaves have cooled, add a tablespoon of the meat mixture and roll it in the centre of the leaf like the picture below...
Pack the dolmas in a casserole and add broth and cook for about an hour. I freeze them after and then eat them as a treat throughout the fall and winter.I do this about two or three times a year and I always run out sometime near Christmas.

Always something to do Around a Garden

The garden is already producing. Yesterday, I picked quite a lot of chard and kale. Normally, both the chard and kale over winter here, but last year they were nipped off by an early frost. We had to go without last winter, so I decided to freeze some this year, just in case.


I was surprised that the cabbage butterflies haven't found the kale yet. Soon they will get into the crop and it will get pretty wormy until the early fall. Then it will be beautiful again. In the meantime, the chicken have learned to love kale.


I plant all the different coloured varieties of chard, although in the end, I prefer the the white stemmed variety. I find the orange and red, get a little tough.

I quickly blanched the chard and kale in boiling water, and then put it in a cold bath. I always start with ice water, but it ends up lukewarm.


Once they were cooled down, I gently squeezed the kale and chard into balls and placed them on a cookie sheet and put them in a freezer. After about 12 hours, I put them in a freezer bag.

The theory is that I can just take a bundle as I need them.