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Biobags

 Biobags are back! These are the compostable bags, made of plant matter, we use to pack down leafy greens and keep them separate from your muddy root veg. You can dispose of these as you would your food waste. For those of you in Glasgow, it sounds like the city council are slowly reintroducing food waste collections; in the meantime, there may be a community garden that accepts food waste for composting near you. 

Going on Holiday?

As lockdown begins to ease, we know you might be planning some time away. If that’s the case be sure to send us an email to let us know which weeks you’d like to pause your veg box for. The deadline to do this is 9am on Monday the week of the holiday- we can’t guarantee pauses requested after that time. If you can let us know earlier, that’s even better, as the extra time lets us plan our harvests and veg buying better. So why not shoot us an email as soon as you’ve booked the train tickets? 

If you miss the deadline, we’re generally able to donate the contents of your box to our charity partners instead of delivering it; you’ll still be charged, however. 

Chilled Items for Collections

If you collect your veg box from our Victoria Road shop, please be sure to grab the chilled items from our fridge. There will be posters up in the shop to let you know what to look for, and you can always ask the staff in the shop to help if you’re having trouble finding something.

Covid-19 Updates

You can read about changes made to our service due to the pandemic here. 

In the Veg Boxes This Week

Subject to last minute changes

Check out storage guidance for helpful tips and tricks on how to prolong the life of your fresh produce. If you’re wondering where your veg comes from, have a look at these maps. You can also join your fellow subscribers over in the Facebook group for lots of tips, tricks, and recipe ideas!

To contact us, ring 0141 378 1672 or email us at subscribers@glasgowlocavore.org

Click here for Veg Box Contents

The Nice Bit

There are those vegetables, like brussels sprouts, that are misunderstood; there are those, like beetroot, that are underrated. There are some I don’t like personally, but wish I did like (mushrooms). And then there’s celery, which can only be described as divisive. Some people adore celery for its crisp bite, its concave hollow so perfect for scooping hummus, its subtle and irreplaceable flavour. But others hate celery for its fibrous strings, its wan green colour, its bitter tones.

Celery has been in the boxes a fair bit lately, as it’s been flourishing on our farm. Locavore celery is massive, with a great bouquet of aromatic leaves. This leaves me with a bit of a dialemma, especially as opt-out lists are still (regretfully) suspended. I’d like to help those of you who love celery celebrate it (celerybrate it), but I don’t want to alienate those of you for whom it is a challenging, unexciting vegetable. Once, celery was the height of glamour, served in grand glass vases. I doubt I can incite such levels of admiration, but perhaps I can provide recipes which will make it a little more welcome in the veg boxes of the celery-haters. And perhaps I can help the celery-lovers find a few more recipes they’d like to try. 

Let’s begin with the celery haters. If what you hate is the stringiness, but you like the flavour and the crunch, try peeling it to remove the strings, like in this recipe for celery with furikake and sesame seeds. If you like the crunch but not so much the taste, try adding finely-chopped celery to guacamole  so that the richness and flavour of the avocado, coriander, and limes disguises the celery while preserving that irreplaceable morish crunch. 

If you don’t much care for the crunch or the taste, then your answer is French mirepoix, Italian sofrito, or the Cajun Holy Trinity. These vegetable bases add incredible flavour to all kinds of dishes. Try a sofrito (onion, celery, carrot) in a rich ragu (I make mine with equal parts pork mince to beef mince, or try this roasted vegetable version if you don’t eat meat). I quite often throw together a basic, inauthentic, vegetarian jambalya based on this recipe. In these dishes, celery melts into the background so that you won’t notice it– but you’d miss it if it was gone. 

But what about you celery lovers? Well, well, well. You might enjoy any or all of the above, but you’ll also want dishes where celery plays a starring role. What about this thai-inspired celery salad with peanuts and fish sauce? I’ll be making this spiced lamb and celery stir-fry. For concentrated celery flavour, go for a gratin, or a soup.

Flowers

Our flowers are Glasgow-grown, bee-friendly and gorgeous. Fill your home with the colours of summer! Subscribe to a small, medium, or large bouquet for a weekly treat, or use the Online Veg Box Shop to add them for special occasions- your half-birthday, a year since you got your pet mouse, the first day it doesn’t rain for a week, you saw a nice cat out your window. 

Good Food Fund

Thank you for your donations to the Good Food Fund, which partners with charities to support those vulnerable to food insecurity. You can donate via subscription, or on the Online Veg Box Shop. You can also choose to donate your veg box to the Good Food Fund when pausing it for a week or longer.