Rainbow chard and Swiss chard are interchangeable in recipes, but the rainbow variety is prettier. Picture gorgeous jewel-coloured vegetation, with beautiful pink, orange, yellow and red stalks and big crinkled leaves. You cook it much like spinach, but giving the stalks a little longer to cook as they are tougher.
My favourite chard recipe is a Moroccan-style pie. Chard, sautéed with onions and garlic, wilts down to a mass of tangled greenery that is then enriched with raisins, pine nuts, lemon zest, salt, black pepper before being combined with a beaten egg and some crumbled feta cheese. This mixture is encased in layers of filo pastry and sprinkled with cinnamon before being baked in the oven. It’s very loosely inspired by a Moroccan pastilla, a sweet-savoury meat pie with sugar and spices. It’s salty and moreishly savoury from the cheese and pine nuts, but with a lovely fresh sweetness from the raisins and lemon that helps lift the rich, iron flavour of the soft chard. It’s also a fantastic way to use up a huge amount of chard leaves, if you have a glut (plus, markets tend to sell them in huge bunches, so it’s always good to have a recipe to help you get through it!)