Alexa Weibel’s creamy Swiss chard pasta with leeks, tarragon and lemon zest.Credit…David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews
In the mid-2010s, I developed an obsession with beauty boxes. For roughly $10 to $15 a month, these trendy subscription services would send you an assortment of skin care, hair care and makeup minis to try — a steal! Never mind that I was signed up for at least four of them at one point.
Every month felt like my birthday, even if I was buying myself the gifts. I reveled in ripping open each mystery box and inspecting the serums and mascaras and body butters inside. I eventually unsubscribed from them all — a girl needs only so many two-ounce curl creams. But I really miss opening those boxes.
Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of receiving a community-supported agriculture box from their local farm knows this thrill. Of course, the seasons provide clues to what’s inside — if the farm doesn’t give you a heads-up the week before or allow you to make some customizations. (Though I’m not sure anyone would expect the “preponderance of onions” one Veggie reader received in hers this time last year.)
So for the latest episode of our Veggie Hotline video series, we channeled the joys and challenges of the box to help you tackle any springtime surprises. Whether the crops actually arrive on your doorstep from a local farm or simply pique your interest at the grocery store matters not.
Credit…Adam Centrella
Watch: How to Use Your Spring CSA Veggies
To guide you in making smarter substitutions and cooking more intuitively, we made our own mock box in the studio, filling it with produce that has stumped readers in the past. Produce like Swiss chard. Everyone is simply drowning in chard. Alexa Weibel’s creamy Swiss chard pasta is your life boat. While the leeks, tarragon and lemon zest in her recipe make this an especially timely dish, the three-ingredient breadcrumb topping, rich with nutritional yeast, is fit for any season. Put it on everything, please.
Creamy Swiss Chard Pasta With Leeks, Tarragon and Lemon Zest
The leafy green also shines in Martha Rose Shulman’s Provençal greens soup, a wholesome and light five-star recipe that serves a spring kitchen. If you must use only one green, let it be Swiss chard. But if you find yourself in possession of, say, dandelion greens or beet greens or watercress or even nettles, this is the place for them. Take special care to temper the eggs here — you’ll want to add a few ladles of broth, little by little, to bring them up to temperature before adding them into the soup (it also helps to use room-temperature eggs!).
Young spring root vegetables like beets and turnips (and their tops!) turn up, too. (Sorry.) While my instinct for the former is to make something borscht-y, I love this surprising no-cook beet dip with labneh, which Tejal Rao adapted from Botanica, a Los Angeles restaurant run by Emily Fiffer and Heather Sperling, who adapted it from Middle Eastern muhammara. It is tangy, earthy and, with the right attitude and dip vehicles, a meal unto itself.
Baby turnips, or hakurei or Tokyo turnips, can also be eaten raw, shaved thinly for salads as you might a radish. But they’re wonderful when lightly cooked, rendering them soft and buttery on the outside while still retaining a little bite, as in Hetty Lui McKinnon’s turnips with whipped pistachio feta. Their pleasantly bitter leafy tops make excellent salad greens, and Hetty uses them to great effect here, tossing them with the warm root vegetables to soften them slightly. “Finally,” wrote a reader in the comments, “a delicious way to use the hakurei turnips in my C.S.A. box.”
Eleanore Park clearly had swaps in mind when she developed her recipe for miso rice cakes with spinach and peas, ideal for the season’s more tender vegetables and herbs. Twirly pea shoots are perfect here in place of spinach, as are fresh stalks of green garlic in place of conventional garlic. Studded with bouncy peas and a mess of mint, dill and cilantro, the tangle of greens that cradle the soft, chewy tteok screams spring. While the contents of your C.S.A. box might come as a surprise, it’s no mystery why everyone is clamoring to give this quick vegan meal a five-star rating.
Credit…Tara Donne for The New York Times
Provençal Greens Soup
Credit…Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Monica Pierini. Prop Stylist: Sophia Eleni Pappas.
Turnips With Whipped Pistachio Feta
Credit…David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Rebecca Jurkevich.
Miso Rice Cakes With Spinach and Peas
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