In an effort to neither waste nor want, I felt the need to devise a recipe for all the chard stems knocking about my kitchen these days. Great green plumes of chard with bright yellow stems are proliferating in our garden, and I love to eat them simply sauteed in lots of good olive oil with garlic and red chile, and maybe a few raisins and pine nuts tossed in. This is so silky in the mouth and tastes like Italian chlorophyll. The stems—crisper and rougher—are usually chucked into the compost pile, though this is sacrilege to the legions of fans who like them stirred into mashed potatoes and buckwheat pancakes, baked in gratins, simply roasted and even pickled. I don't do much baking, as you know, but of late I've had a bee in my bonnet about making a galette—one of those free-form rustic tarts that basically scream farmhouse chic. This simple dough can be wrapped around anything from wild nettles to fresh peaches with a perfectly French insouciance.

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When I was growing up, every 7 years my family lived in Spain. My father was a professor of Spanish literature, and he spent his sabbaticals doing research, writing and collecting the Sephardic ballads that were his specialty. The year I turned 15 there, my sisters (5 and 7 years older than I) were already out of the house, so I was  essentially an only child. I went everywhere with my parents, which meant a very diverse cultural life (opera, theater, dance, symphony, museums, galleries), lots of meals out and visits to some very fancy Madrid residences. Perhaps because we were in Europe—or maybe it had something to do with the almost exclusively adult company—the rules relaxed a bit and I was often allowed a glass of sherry, cointreau or vino tinto. This set the stage for expanding my appetite, too, and I tried many unknown delicacies: octopus, white asparagus, kidneys, membrillo. The latter was a deep-amber-colored jelly that was often brought out with the cheese course (another novelty), a sticky, sweet confection to pair with the rich oily Manchego. At the time, I had never seen a quince, and it's a bit of a leap anyway from that fuzzy, essentially inedible fruit to this jammy nectar of the gods.
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