Lettuce and turnips and kale, oh my

As the spring has burned into summer, I am on an adventure. One that includes semi-secret ingredients and a CSA.

That's not a covert-ops group, but Community Supported Agriculture.

Here's how a CSA works. In the winter, small farmers sell shares in what they plan to produce. The shares supply the up-front money the farmers need to plant their crops. Then each week from spring through fall, members receive a box of goodies.

I love the idea of supporting small farmers and getting ultra-fresh produce. I would have joined a CSA before now, but I couldn't find one that delivered in Raleigh and didn't want to drive every week to pick up veggies in Chapel Hill or Durham.

I signed up this year with Coon Rock Farm's CSA, which supplies the restaurant Zely & Ritz in downtown Raleigh. I pick up my box of veggies at the restaurant.

For the past few weeks, I have received helpful e-mails from the farm telling me what is likely to be in the box. One challenge is telling the romaine from the African collards, and figuring out what an African collard is.

I feel like I'm holding my own Iron Chef competition.

After picking up my first box, I stood in my kitchen, mind racing through recipes and flavors.

I opened the box to find ... lettuce. Lots of lettuce. Different kinds of lettuce. Near the bottom, some tiny, adorable radishes.

It was mid-May, and lettuce was in season locally. I knew that.

So I made a salad. The next day, I made another salad.

The following day, I looked in the refrigerator. Was that bunch of leaf lettuce expanding? I made a salad, switching my dressing from olive oil and herb vinegar to lemon juice and olive oil. Don't want to get in a rut.

The pressure's on

Lettuce can put a lot of pressure on a cook. You can't freeze it or make pickles out of it, and really tender lettuce gets soft as fast as a Fudgsicle in July.

There are next to no ways to cook it. You can rub a sturdy head of romaine with olive oil and put it on the grill. (Turn it fast, or it will incinerate.) Then you can make, yes, a salad. But it will be a salad that has the smoky flavor of a burger. A little Parmesan or feta is nice on top.

Now this was great lettuce, lettuce like I hadn't tasted since my father and I used to snip leaves of Black-Seeded Simpson from his backyard garden and eat them an hour later.

But the leafy stuff seemed to stretch on into eternity, appearing in the next week's and the next week's boxes.

Some romaine remained one Saturday night, and I just could not shred another leaf. Then I remembered lettuce cups. I'd eaten them at a Thai restaurant, the lettuce leaves standing in for egg roll or rice wrappers.

I stir-fried some Chinese cabbage and chopped shrimp with soy sauce, fish sauce and chili-garlic sauce, then threw in some bean threads. I made a little sweet-sour sauce, then my husband and I stuffed the leaves and ate, the lettuce cool and crunchy against the spicy filling.

The greens period

After surviving the lettuce marathon, I entered the greens period: kale, spinach, Chinese cabbage, bok choy, African collards and head cabbage.

The greens from the CSA box were supplemented by a head of The Bok Choy That Devoured West Raleigh, left at my front door by my neighbor Tom.

All greens are good with enough olive oil, garlic and onion. I could have stuffed the resulting sauteed mixture into calzones or ravioli with some cheese, I suppose.

But I have been enjoying the blend as-is. Throwing those different greens together really creates an intriguing flavor, the milder, sweeter ones balancing out the more bitter ones.

The stir-fry approach also worked with the most recent arrivals, kohlrabi and turnips.

These vegetables have high negatives with me, to use political campaign lingo. I was accustomed to turnips with the size and texture of bowling balls, and kohlrabi that I'd tasted in the past was bitter.

But the golf ball-size turnips and vivid purple kohlrabi could be cut without power tools. They joined the stir-fry family nicely, once I removed the slightly bitter peel from both.

Now I fear not the vegetable bounty in my future. I am armed with my mantra for whatever that cunning CSA box can throw at me: When in doubt, stir-fry.