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.
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!
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
When massive celebrity, felt genius, and my personal friend Kermit Thefrog sang “one day we’ll find it, the rainbow connection”, he didn’t actually mean rainbow carrots. But he could have done, so joy-giving and wonderful these colourful root veg are. It’s easy, I will admit, to get bored of ordinary carrots (although they have their splendours and it’s worth the effort of remembering them) but rainbow carrots are, in their surprise and their variety, rejuvenating. Roast them to turn them into jewels, sweet and gleaming, a transformation for alchemists to envy.
Rainbow carrots are, in their way, more honest about what a carrot is, which is to say: it’s not necessarily orange. I’m sure we’ve all read the fact on the smarties tube about why carrots are now so very thoroughly orange (if you haven’t, here’s an explanation and, of course, a debunking of the fun fact, with other fun facts to replace it until they in turn are debunked). And the orange is bright and lovely, undeniably so; but it makes the fact of what carrots are harder to see. They are root veg, simple and sweet, with long stems and lovely leaves. They’re related to parsnips, yes, but also celery and parsley (and indeed celeriac is sometimes called “celery root” and there is such a thing as “parsley root” too.) What we eat habitually is not the same as what is edible, or even delicious, although of course being edible and at least a little delicious are prerequisites for inclusion in the roster. The veg we know and love is the result of thousands of years of agricultural (and culinary) experiment, marketing pressures, logistics, climates, migration… And so we eat orange carrots, and sometimes have rainbow ones too, and as Kermit will tell you, rainbows are memories, sweet dream reminders – of the fact that if the butterfly had flapped its wings a little differently we’d be eating parsley root and purple carrots every day.