Chinese New Year Recipe: Twice Cooked Chard

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Southern California cooks will love this market-driven vegetarian riff on twice-cooked pork. Fuchsia Dunlop’s Twice Cooked Chard borrows the method of traditional twice-cooked pork without the meat. It makes a perfect accompaniment to her Steamed Sea Bass with Ginger and Spring Onion and if you add a bowl of steamed rice to the table you’ve got a perfect New Years feast.

In her new book, Every Grain of Rice, Dunlop explains that “Chard, known in Chinese as “ox leather greens” or “thickskinned greens” because of its leathery appearance, is a humble peasant vegetable, so humble in fact that it is traditionally referred to as “pig fodder.” In the not-so-distant past, only the desperate would eat it…Nowadays, with the vogue for rustic food, erstwhile poverty dishes like this have reappeared on restaurant menus, to the bemusement of real peasants.”

Keep reading for her recipe…