It's quite a while since we first encountered the simple, delicious, memorable dish called blitva on our way to a sailing holiday in Croatia. Coastal Dalmatia is fascinating for its thousands of islands, rocky cliffs and ancient culture, dominated over the centuries by Greeks, Romans, Turks, Venetians, French, British, Russians and so on... Meanwhile the peasants had to live somehow. Fish was there in magnificent quantities, and the steep landscape must have been hard work but provided vegetables and herbs. Maybe there was always a rich v poor culture. Blitva is definitely on the 'poor' side, being (in our era, at least) a construct of potatoes and chard. Quayside restaurants tend to be real tourist-traps with highly inflated prices and unlikely to offer this on the menus unless you ask for it - the waiters will look surprised because you are ordering really basic unglamorous stuff, almost like asking for boiled eggs and soldiers in Soho.... But if you step back a street or two, to cafes where the locals are eating, blitva is normal. And delicious.
You boil some spuds cut into smallish pieces. Before they are done, you add some chard - prepared by cutting off the toughest stalks and then slicing into 1" strips. Put on a lid, and then in a separate pan gently heat a good slug of nice olive oil and some mashed up garlic. When the vegetables are soft (not overcooked), strain them and add to the oil. Add some salt - and that's it. It's hearty, delicious, healthy, simple and rather basic. It goes well with spicy fish, or barbecued meat, or eggs, or just on its own.
We cooked blitva tonight to eat with some scallops - if I could load the pictures up now I would... but there seems to be some technical obstacle.
The joy of tonight's meal was that the blitva came almost entirely from our allotment, even at this dead time of year... the potatoes (Duke of York), and the splendid red Swiss Chard, and even the garlics. Only the olive oil, the scallops and the fish were foreign.
