By Joe Yonan Food and Dining Editor January 26

I had a cabbage issue as a kid. When my mother would cook it boil the life out of it, really the kitchen filled with that pungent smell, and it was one of the very few things I truly refused to eat. She would make stuffed cabbage, filling the little rolls with a meat-and-rice combination, nestling them in a nice tomato sauce, and I would beg her to make at least a few of them naked, without the cabbage wrapper or, better yet, to make stuffed peppers instead.

She relented.

These days, Im a brassica hound, loving all members of the cabbage family: kale, collards and Brussels sprouts, too. But theyre not the only greens in my rotation. Especially because its so easy to grow in my little front-yard garden, Ive become increasingly enamored of Swiss chard, which is related to beets, not cabbage, and has a milder taste than any of the brassicas, not to mention a more tender texture, akin to a cross between spinach and kale.

Chard, like all the greens, is a natural partner to grains. The great Paula Wolfert made the case for the versatility of the combination in her 1998 book Mediterranean Grains and Greens, and now Molly Watson has written a modern take on the idea, Greens + Grains (Chronicle, 2014). She combines beet greens with barley for borscht, she wraps feta with grilled collards and serves them with quinoa crackers, she stuffs cornmeal cakes with dandelion greens.

Given the time of year and my childhood memories, it was the stuffed chard in tomato sauce that I wanted to make first. Watson is riffing on the traditional Eastern European dish of stuffed cabbage called golubtsy (little doves), using chard instead and filling the leaves with a seasoned combination of barley, quinoa and finely chopped chard stems. When I made it, the grains swelled as the little doves simmered in the tomato sauce, and the kitchen filled with a wonderfully deep but not pungent aroma.

My mother lives more than a thousand miles away, and even though I just saw her a few weeks ago, the taste of these made me miss her, and her stuffed cabbage, terribly.

Continued here:
Weeknight Vegetarian: Greens and grains meet again, in tidy little packages