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.

Fruit

This is a tricky time of year for fruit, with little variety even internationally. Europe’s citrus season is now over, but stone fruit is only just starting, and apples, pears, and melons are a while away still. Please bear with us during this time if your fruit bag is a little sparse- we’re working on sourcing more fruit, and will have a wider range as soon as more is in season.

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

Our veg boxes contain only UK-grown veg this week, which is wonderful, and very exciting. While we’re not at the peak of UK produce yet, we are seeing things start to increase as crops slowly come into season. UK onions, cauliflower, cabbages and lettuce make a well-rounded box, balanced between the bulky and the leafy. But most exciting of all is that we have the first Isle of Wight tomatoes of the year. These are a Locavore staple of the late Spring and Summer months, and come from the lovely Tomato Stall, where they grow their sweet, organic tomatoes in one of the UK’s sunniest spots.

Fresh tomatoes are what to choose anywhere you really need that fresh taste, which is why they’re particularly excellent in curries. Try Meera Sodha’s tomato curry with tamarind and coconut milk for something that really celebrates that flavour.

Roasted tomatoes are also sublime. If you don’t fancy the viral tik tok feta-and-tomato pasta (although it’s really very good), you can roast tomatoes topped with breadcrumbs, parmesan (or nutritional yeast), and lots of olive oil, then mashing the results up and stirring through freshly boiled spaghetti. Bruschetta hasn’t needed promoting since the 1990s, I think, but even if you’re not having dinner parties you can’t do much better than fried or roasted tomatoes on toast- again, with loads of olive oil and maybe a little garlic. The sourdough bread we offer from Freedom Bakery or Different Breid make perfect accompliments, as long as you have a plate held under your chin to catch the tomato juice that’ll drip through the holes in the bread (destined to be soaked up by a crust).

Of course, you don’t need to cook fresh tomatoes at all. If you want to make a tomato salad, you’re in excellent world-wide company- there are tomato salads with origins in India, Palestine, Italy, France, Mexico, Greece, and isn’t it an utter delight that we can eat all of them in Scotland?

If you need more ideas for your tomatoes- and really, there’s no end of wonderful ways to eat them- I can’t think of a better place to direct you than the Tomato Stall website, where they have lots of suggestions.