Homemade Herb Croutons and Wilted Swiss Chard Salad

My sweet mama gave us leftover bread crusts from the finger sandwiches she made for the shower. She knew I would find something to do with them. I have always wanted to make herb croutons so we tried it. I thought I would share the recipe.

You need:
3 T olive oil
4 minced garlic cloves
rosemary
thyme or any other herb fresh or dried herb you have on hand
salt and pepper to taste
bread (we used mostly crust because that is what we had and it was stale bread, we left it out overnight)

Steps:
1. Cut the bread into cubes. Araina loved that I trusted her with a knife. She did a great job!

2. Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
3. Heat olive oil in medium skillet over medium heat. Add garlic and chopped herbs. Saute until fragrant.
4. Remove from heat, add bread and toss it in the garlic oil until evenly coated.
5. Put bread onto rimmed baking sheet. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.
6. Put in oven, bake for 10 minutes, stir, cook for another 8-10 minutes until golden brown. Then you have croutons! Yea!


While the croutons were baking we wanted to whip up a yummy salad to sprinkle them on. Now, my granny has been getting on my case about not posting some of our vegetarian cooking. So here you have it Granny. My girls are raw foods kind of girls, they will eat any leaf offered to them. When they tried Swiss chard for the first time Araina liked it; Fauna, not so much. Fauna thought that she would like it better if we "herbed" it up a bit. So we went out to the garden and gathered some radish sprouts and Swiss chard. Then put our heads together and came up with this recipe for "Wilted Swiss Chard Salad."

This is what we used in our salad:
Swiss chard
radish sprouts
garbanzo beans
little red tomatoes
olive oil
garlic
salt and pepper to taste
rosemary
thyme
croutons

*I didn't include amounts because Fauna actually put most of this recipe together. Boy, was she HEAVY on the rosemary, she always says, "you can never have too much rosemary!"

1. In a medium skillet saute garlic, rosemary and thyme in olive oil until fragrant.
2. Add the garbanzo beans and tomatoes. Stir for about 8 minutes, depending on how crispy you want the beans. Salt and pepper to taste.
3. Tear up the Swiss chard and add to the bean mixture. Wilt the chard and remove from the heat. 4. Add the croutons and radish sprouts and you have "Wilted Swiss Chard Salad."

It was very yummy, even with the large amount of rosemary! The girls added black olives on the side.

*Don't let their faces fool you, they ate every last bit and plan on making more in the future. See all of the laundry in the background? That is the part of my life that I like to ignore!