This week’s box included: cucumbers, spring onions, bag of spinach, bag of spring mix/young lettuces, bunch of turnip greens, pint of strawberries, and a huge head of green leaf lettuce. You can see a photo that can help with identification on our Facebook page or check out our weekly video on Instagram.
Need storage instructions? Visit our fruit & veggie home pages. Click on the pic and a new page opens with storage instructions and a list of recipes curated by Conne Ward Cameron over the years.
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Welcome to the 2026 CSA! We are excited to start early, which gave us a jump on the strawberries. It wouldn’t be spring without these jewels. Fun fact: this is the earliest that we’ve started our CSA deliveries in the last 20 years.
First, plan your attack based on storage requirements.
Storage Suggestions
Start with the spring mix and spinach. Nick a hole in the bottom of their plastic bags and drain out any moisture that’s collected in the bottom to help the leaves last longer. The cut lettuces & spinach are not washed by the farm but they do carry speckles of dew from their early morning harvest. Why harvest early? The coolness of night is nature’s refrigeration. Harvesting later in the day necessitates artificially generated cooling to get the field heat out. Better to work with nature.
That huge ruffled head of green leaf lettuce will last longer while intact. Help it retain its moisture by tucking it into a plastic shopping bag (the indignity of it, I know). Leave it open in the refrigerator with damp paper towels draped over the top.
Cucumbers, spring onions and the turnip greens get tucked into the produce drawers. Do you still have strawberries? They don’t continue to ripen after harvest which is one of the reasons it’s difficult to get tasty strawberries in conventional stores where supply chains necessitate picking early and growing varieties that withstand shipping. Peak flavor has to develop on the bush, tender and fleeting.
I’m reminded of Conne’s excellent suggestion when confronted with a box full of greens. Put a large bowl in the sink, fill it with cold water, and let the greens soak. This trick will revive even the most tired of lettuce leaves, like magic. Remove leaves from the water bath, drain, and dry them for storage. I think the best drying method is to wrap them in paper towels or cotton tea towels. A spinner comes in handy, however I’ve found that aggressive spinning damages the leaves. Speaking of Conne, Conne Ward Cameron has been our resident vegetable whisperer for years. She’s consistently served up a stream of delicious recipes along with a glimpse into her kitchen and life. She’s taking a step back from writing the weekly messages for us this year. I’ll miss that peek into what she’s cooking and what her family enjoys. If any of you subscribers feel called to contribute a weekly message here and there, let us know. Back to “lettuce”, I know.
Recipe Ideas
That beautiful head of lettuce is the inspiration of the week. Time for a week of exuberant salads! First on deck, we’ll be enjoying a dinner-sized salad studded with cucumbers, spring onions, and any leftover veggies to add color, topped with seared tofu or shredded baked chicken for a protein kick. Consider this green goddess dressing from Martha Stewart from our lettuce recipe archives, or my favorite ranch dressing recipe from local Chef Virginia Willis, below. Out of convenience, we buy bottled dressing more often than is sane. Virginia’s ranch will leave you wondering why you ever considered doing that. It’s easy & so much more delicious than factory dressing.
Old-Fashioned Buttermilk Ranch Dressing
From Chef Virginia Willis
I put the ingredients into a pint-sized ball jar, cap it and shake. To macerate the garlic, first chop it into smaller pieces, generously sprinkle with salt and use the flat side of your knife to smash and smear the chopped bits into a slurry. The salt grains do the work for you.
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup buttermilk (or sub plain yogurt)
3 tablespoons sour cream
2 green onions (white and green parts), chopped
2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1 clove garlic, very finely chopped
Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper
In a bowl, combine the mayonnaise, buttermilk, sour cream, green onions, parsley, vinegar, mustard, and garlic; season with salt and pepper. Store in an airtight container. The garlic becomes very strong if made more than a day in advance.
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Other salad lettuce ideas …. spinach salad with strawberries, toasted pecans, a sprinkling of spring onions, and crumbled feta topped with a simple balsamic vinaigrette barely sweetened with a drop of honey to tame the tang. Give it a twist of pepper for the heat. Once the tomatoes hit it’ll be time for one of my favorite dinner salads, the BLT: top salad leaves with a gracious plenty of cooked and crumbled bacon, beefy chunks of tomatoes, a twist or two of pepper. Cannot wait. In the meantime, that spinach can go the standard restaurant spinach salad route, with a bacon dressing and maybe the jammy eggs from the recipe below. If you’re needing more lettuce inspiration, our recipe index for lettuce includes Laab Gai (use lettuce leaves to wrap Thai-spiced ground meat), and my favorite Spiced Lettuce Cake Bars. You’re not to the grilled lettuce point yet, are you? It’s great, too. Forgo the shells and make taco night green. I swear I won’t be making a hat out of the head of lettuce, though it’s tempting, but know that this is what I’ve been dreaming of for months while perusing anemic narrow heads of lettuce stacked like cordwood. Thank you, Riverview, for the real thing.
I’ve been meaning to master the jammy egg skill. The NY Times Cooking app (warning, addictive) shared a jammy egg recipe recently. My recollection was wrong, though — it was actually a recipe for spanakorizo which features spinach (or turnip greens) and the mystical jammy egg. Perfect.
Spanakorizo With Jammy Eggs
NY Times’ Hetty Lui McKinnon
Turnip greens can be substituted for spinach in this recipe.
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for serving
1 bunch scallions (6 to 9 stems), trimmed and thinly sliced
1 pound baby spinach (or 1 pound mature spinach, trimmed and roughly chopped)
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
Salt and pepper
1 cup basmati rice
1½ cups vegetable stock
4 large eggs
1 lemon, juiced (3 to 4 tablespoons)
1 cup roughly chopped dill or parsley
1 (6-ounce) block Greek feta, crumbled (about 1⅓ cups)
Heat a large, wide Dutch oven or deep skillet on medium-high heat. Add the olive oil and scallions and stir until fragrant and softened, 2 minutes. Add the spinach (depending upon the size of your pot, you may need to add it gradually, throwing in more as it cooks down), garlic and about 1 teaspoon salt; toss until wilted, about 2 minutes.
Stir in the rice, then pour in the stock. Bring to the boil and then cover, reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until the liquid has been absorbed and rice is cooked, 15 to 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, bring a medium pot of water to a boil over high. Add the eggs in their shells to the boiling water and continue to cook over medium-high for 7 minutes. (Make sure you set a timer.) Set up an ice bath. Using a spider ladle or slotted spoon, remove the eggs from the water and immediately add them to the ice bath. Cool for 3 to 4 minutes and then peel them.
When the rice is ready, turn off the heat. Uncover and add the lemon juice and half of the herbs and gently toss them through the rice. Taste to check seasonings, adding salt if needed.
Divide the spinach rice among bowls. Halve the eggs and place the halves on top of the rice; top each with feta and additional herbs. To finish, drizzle over some olive oil and season well with pepper.
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Here’s to celebrating all of your greens this week!
~Suzanne