Swiss Chard Soup

Last year I grew swiss chard in the vegetable patch. It did remarkably well and we've been used it as a substitute for spinach, which worked very well. Here is a picture my husband took the last year. 

What I love about the swiss chard is that it matches our house really well, with it's red stalks and green leaves. Maybe I will change the paint in my living room to match it (just joking!). We've tried all kinds of things like eating it as a salad, making what Germans call Rahmspinat, in fried rice, with noodles, in cutlets and in patties. 

Preparation time: 30 minutes; makes 1 litre

Ingredients:

1 medium	Onion
2 tbsp.	Oil
2 cloves	Garlic
500g	Swiss chard
1 L	Milk
1.5 tbsp.	Flour
1/3	Vegtable cube (Knorr)
	Salt and pepper

Method:

Making this soup is really easy. Start by chopping your onions. They can be chopped any way you like because you will blend your soup at the end. Heat a saucepan on medium high heat. When the pan is hot add the oil and then the onions. 

A note here, if you use a stick to blend your soup don't make your soup in a non-stick pan, because your stick will damage the teflon coating. 

While the onions are frying coarsely chop the garlic and add it to the pan. You should stir the onions every now and then to prevent them from burning. While everything is cooking chop your Swiss chard roughly. 

You should chop the stems a bit finer than the leaves. I chopped them in 1 cm pieces. 

Then add the leaves to the pan and stir. Put the lid on the pan and let it cook until the leaves have wilted. You will notice because you'll have a whole lot less of leaves in your pan!

Remove the lid and sprinkle 1.5 tbsp. of flour over the leaves. Stir the flour in and keep stirring until all the flour is incorporated and cook for another minute so that the flour gets cooked. Next add the milk, salt, pepper and vegetable cube. I use a Knorr cube, which is huge so I used about a third. You don't want to add stock to your soup. I don't actually know why, but the only definite piece of advice my mother gave me to making this soup is "do not put any water in it". 

Heat everything through and then puree your soup. The quickest and easiest way to do this is to use a stick blender. If you have a metal one you can just stick it directly into your saucepan and puree the mixture. If you do this be very careful. Make sure that your blade is fully immersed all the time and start out on your lowest speed. Any mistakes here will result in hot soup flying all over your kitchen and possibly all over you. A safer way to do this would be to cool down the soup and then puree it. If you are transferring the soup to a liquidiser you should definitely cool the soup down before liquidising it. 

Once pureed reheat and serve hot.