Chard Stem Pickles - NYTimes.com I share a lot of dinners with my closest friends, Maggie and Steve, and over the past year I've sampled some wonderful sweet pickled vegetables at their house - radishes and turnips, cauliflower and cucumbers - laid out with other nibbles that we enjoy with drinks before dinner. Every time I ask about the recipe and every time Steve tells me it's from the Momofuku cookbook. Then I go home and forget about it. But last week, with a surfeit of vegetables bought on impulse at the farmers" market and plans for a trip that was going to take me away for five days, long enough for some of them to come to no good in my refrigerator, I decided I'd look up the Momofuku/David Chang recipe and put up my vegetables before leaving. Mr. Chang's recipe was too sweet for my palate, so I reduced the sugar by a third and added a tablespoon of sherry vinegar to his rice wine vinegar brine. I sliced most of the vegetables as thin as I could, using a knife rather than a mandoline. If you have a mandoline you can slice them even thinner, which is good. I added spices to some of the vegetables - caraway to beets and to carrots, chili and cumin to cauliflower - but not to all. I found that most of the vegetables benefited from time in the brine; they were tasty after even a few hours, but really infused after five days. Radishes were the one vegetable that tasted better when infused for a short time as opposed to a longer period. The pickled vegetables make great snacks and hors d'oeuvres. They look beautiful on a platter. They're also good with a sandwich or with cottage cheese, a quick and easy way to make vegetables part of your lunch. Note that this week we are not including nutritional information with the recipes. It isn't possible to do the analyses accurately, because we don't know how much of each vegetable you will eat, and each vegetable absorbs a slightly different amount of brine and ingredients in the brine. I weighed the brine before and 10 days after pickling each vegetable and found that not much of the brine had actually been absorbed. As for the yield and serving sizes, the recipes make 1 to 2 cups of pickled vegetables. The number of servings really depends on how you are serving them. They will serve more as a nibble than as a salad or side. Chard Stem Pickles It occurred to me that pickling would be a great thing to do with wide chard stalks. They're crunchy and absorbent, and the texture stands up to weeks of pickling. Red chard or a mix of rainbow chard stalks is especially pretty if you serve within a few days of pickling; in time, the color will fade. Slice them very thin. 1 to 2 cups very thinly sliced chard stalks (slice less than 1/4 inch thick) Place the chard stalks in a jar or bowl. Pour over the chard stalks, cover and refrigerate for at least 2 days before eating and for up to 2 weeks. Shake the jar from time to time or, if you use a bowl, place a saucer on top of the chard stems to keep them submerged. Variation: Add to the chard stalks 4 small spring onions, bulbs only, cut in half lengthwise. This imparts a mild onion flavor to the brine and to the pickled chard stalks. Advance preparation: These stay crunchy and delicious for at least 10 days.