The Online Veg Box Shop is open for deliveries next week.
This week, we’re pleased to introduce two items of charcuterie from Peelham Farm in Berwickshire, one of the suppliers for our meat boxes. Their fennel salami and chorizo are on the Veg Box Online Shop this week- and is there anything better to build a lazy spring lunch around? Leftover cold roast veg, maybe a salad, a loaf of bread, salami, maybe some cheese: wonderful. The chorizo, of course, is incredible for adding flavour to pretty much anything you like. You can fry it til crisp, put it aside, and use the rich red oil to cook broccoli for a side; or cook a tin of tomatoes in that oil, stir in a tin of creamy butter beans, simmer til they’re soft and the sauce is rich and have with olive-oil-drizzled toast.
As always, our Online Veg Box Shop is stocked with everything you need to turn the contents of your veg box into many delicious dinners, from black garlic to fresh garlic, baked beans to borlotti, brown rice penne to basmati.
The deadline to get your orders in is 11pm Monday.
Headlines
Spring
A new sign of the season changing is that lockdown restrictions are easing- hooray! If you’ll be out and about more often now, you might need to think about how your veg box is delivered. If there’s a safe place to leave it, drop us an email. If you live in a block of flats or tenement, we can take a key to the close and leave your deliveries outside your flat door. Email us for the address.
And if you’re planning to go away, remember that you can let us know up to 9am on Monday in the week you need to pause for. We greatly appreciate earlier notice, however, as it helps us order only the veg we need and avoid waste.
Eggs
Previously we had a shortage of eggs- thankfully, this is now over, so if you’d like to add a box or two to your subscription, email and let us know.
Send me your recipes!
If you’ve got a recipe you can’t stop cooking, something that makes the most of the season’s plenty, please send it to me at saoirse@glasgowlocavore.org. It might be featured in the newsletter, and you’ll get a bit of credit on your veg box account to say thanks if it is!
Packaging
Just a reminder of what we collect from your door each week:
Veg Boxes– we reuse these
Online Veg Box Shop boxes– we reuse these
Mossgiel Milk bottles – we return these to the dairy for reuse
Ed’s Bees jars – we return these to Ed (and his bees) for reuse
Plastic bottle lids – we recycle these
Plant pots from Locavore potted herbs- our farm reuses these
Locavore hummus Vegware pots – we return these to vegware to be biodegraded
Ella’s Kitchen baby food pouches – we recycle these
We aren’t able to accept glass bottles, egg boxes, or any other items for recycling, I’m afraid. Please dispose of these as you choose.
We’re running low on veg boxes at the moment, so please do remember to leave them out- reusing them as many times as possible helps keep our veg box scheme as carbon-efficient as possible
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’s green garlic in the supplementary veg bags this week, a sure sign the spring is steadily ticking on, as I meditated on (somewhat anxiously, I wonder why) here last May. We have the earliest chard, spinach, and parsley from our own Neilston farm, and some late purple sprouting broccoli. The dry spell down south and the late freeze up here is lengthening the depth of the hungry gap, so the splendid full rush of greens is a little way away yet. This year we’ve made the difficult decision to include some produce from Europe where necessary, and are reaching out to a range of organic farms locally to make sure we have the full array of fresh green things as soon as they’re in season. This is the hardest time for eating seasonally in the UK, and for fruit across Europe. We have lots to look forward to: asparagus, Isle of Wight tomatoes, broad beans from Caldwell’s Veg, turnips, rhubarb (not long off!), salad leaves and lettuces, UK courgettes, Scottish radishes… All these things that barely need a dressing to be appealing, fresh and perfect.
Until then, we have UK pak choi- perfect just softened in a light broth and drizzled with chilli oil- and Spanish courgettes perfect for fritters, dipped in a minty, garlicky tzatziki. We have red onions to slice into salads, base sauces on, or roast for extra sweetness. Mushrooms you know my stance on, but if they suit you better, a little paper bag of them may be enough to get you through until next week. Chard is best, I think, with anchovies and cooked down, but here’s a recipe from Sally for a thoran that sounds amazing too. So we’ll eat very well, with one eye on the near future and the goodness it holds, but the other firmly fixed in what we have, even now, in this hungry gap.