This week’s box included: cucumbers, spring onions, bag of spinach, strawberries, kale, head of green leaf lettuce, head of butterleaf lettuce, carrots, bok choy, radishes.
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 over the years.
This is week #2 for us but for many of you this is your first delivery of 2026. Welcome! We didn’t really want to start early, but Mother Nature had other thoughts. Pushy. This is the earliest that we’ve started our CSA deliveries in the last 20 years! Sure is good to be back, though.
First plan of attack is an assessment of the staying power of this week’s bounty.
Storage Suggestions
Cucumbers, spring onions, carrots, kale, and radishes are the longest keepers here. Cut the tops of the radishes before storing. But surely you’re going to chop them all and make one of those salads with the extras arranged in stripes along the top!
Bagged Spinach will last longer if you nick a hole in the bottom of the plastic bag 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. Note: There’s not enough spinach to go around, so some folks are getting broccoli instead. There will be more broccoli for everyone soon!
Bok Choy lasts a long time in the refrigerator, with leaves on the bulb. Check the bottom before storing; if there is any gooeyness, trim that off before storing.
Head 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.
Strawberries do not 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 enjoy them at room temp, postponing putting them into the refrigerator until the last moment.
I’m reminded of Conne Ward Cameron’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. Conne 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
The salad party continues. Spring greens are nature’s tonic — they’re what your body needs most right now. Dig in! A simple and visually stunning “recipe” arranges the chopped salad toppings in stripes over the top, like this. Need some protein? Add strips of chopped hardboiled eggs, chicken, ham, cheese, nuts. This week’s radishes, cucumbers, spring onions, and carrots will be beautiful here. Dress your leaves and other chopped fresh veggies with this super easy Chipotle Honey Vinaigrette. Bonus: the leftover dressing keeps for a long time. Serve the dressing separately. Any leftover undressed salad goes back into the refrigerator for lunches, topped with a fried egg or other protein.
Other ideas: Recipes from our lettuce archives include Momofuku’s Bo Ssam that wraps tender pork roast with a crunchy sweet shell in lettuce leaves. Want to go outside the box? Creamy Lettuce & Garlic Soup is here for you. Though not technically that far out of the box, vegetable pancakes will make quick work of a gracious plenty of shredded lettuce, bok choy, or any other spring veggies you have around. Our recipe trove includes this recipe for Okonomiyaki, a traditional Japanese dish with a yummy soy-based dipping sauce, and Mark Bittman’s Vegetable Pancakes.
One new recipe, recommended by a long-time subscriber: Smitten Kitchen‘s Buffalo Chicken Cobb salad. We love hearing what works for you — send in your favorites!
Buffalo Chicken Cobb Salad
From Smitten Kitchen
You can skip the chicken for a vegetarian version. Consider using the carrots, radishes and cucumbers from your box and sub the spring onions for purple onion.
1/2 cup buttermilk, shaken
1/2 cup mayonnaise
Juice of half a lemon (about 1 1/2 tablespoons)
1/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 small garlic clove, minced
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
Many grinds of black pepper
1/4 cup minced fresh chives, divided
Buffalo sauce
6 tablespoons hot sauce, ideally Franks
4 tablespoons melted butter
Salad and assembly
6 to 6 1/2 cups diced fresh vegetables, such as celery, carrots, bell pepper, cucumber, and tomatoes
1 cup diced red onion (from 1 small)
4 to 6 ounces diced blue cheese, such as a Danish blue
4 to 5 ounces romaine or baby gem lettuce, sliced or torn
1 pound boneless chicken thighs, grilled and sliced, ideally still warm
Make creamy dressing: Whisk everything to combine and add half (2 tablespoons) of the minced chives. Taste and adjust ingredients such as salt and pepper as needed.
Make buffalo sauce: Whisk butter and hot sauce to combine and set aside.
To serve: Arrange vegetables, onion, and blue cheese on a large platter. Place lettuce in a large bowl. I like to keep the chicken separate just in case someone doesn’t eat it.
To assemble: Place some lettuce on plate, followed by chicken. Add all of the vegetables, onion, and cheese you like then drizzle with creamy dressing, followed by buffalo sauce. Garnish with remaining chives.
***
PS: on lettuce: Other salad lettuce ideas we shared last week include:
- Simple balsamic vinaigrette
- The BLT: top salad leaves with a gracious plenty of cooked and crumbled bacon, beefy chunks of tomatoes, a twist or two of pepper.
- Laab Gai: lettuce wrapped Thai-spiced ground meat)
- Spiced Lettuce Cake Bars
- Grilled lettuce point yet, are you? It’s great, too.
- Taco “shells.” Make taco night green!
On to the rest of the box!
Carrots: I’ve been playing around with a carrot “candy” that braises them on the stove with a scant drizzle of honey or maple syrup + cumin. Shredding them to add color to salads is a winner. Carrots keep for an unreasonaly long time in the refrigerator, but if you want to move them into long-term storage consider freezing carrot chunks to use in mirepoix with the celery that will be in boxes later this spring. Use your mirepoix to make homemade chicken broth: simmer on low heat for 3 hours with chicken bones from other meals that you froze; add a bay leave, thyme twigs for the last hour. Strain, and freeze for future use.
Radishes: Go no further than Steven Satterfield’s Radish Sandwiches. Move over, tomato sandwiches. This one will have you elbowing people out of the way to get to the radishes first.
Bok Choy: Chopped bok choy can substitute for cabbage or lettuce in Okonomiyai pancakes mentioned earlier. Or seared in a skillet with a topping of Bully Boy’s Teriyaki Sauce over rice — I halved the sugar in this recipe and it was still plenty sweet. Super handy to have around — this would also be good on the vegetable pancakes. To sautee bok choy, heat skillet over med high or maybe even higher heat. Add 1 tablespoon of high temp oil like canola. Add chopped white parts of bok choy first. Let them sit in the scant oil until seared — resist temptation to stir. Toss after the first side is nicely browned, add minced garlic, ginger root, and top with the chopped green tops of the bok choy. Stir a couple of times while cooking. When the greens are wilted, add sauce. Once the sauce is warm, serve over rice.
Kale: My favorite? This Kale Pesto recipe. Add the radish tops that you surely reserved. There goes a bunch of kale! Kale, Lettuce and Strawberry is another perfect celebration of this week’s harvest.
Happy early spring!
~Suzanne