The Online Veg Box Shop is Now Open

 The Online Veg Box Shop is open for deliveries next week. 

The Online Veg Box Shop is open for deliveries next week. 

This promotion from the Online Veg Box Shop is brought you by the letter “T” for “treat”, as in “get yourself a wee treat”. A very nice thing to do for your future self is pop a wee treat into your veg box and then forget about it. When your veg box arrives, with a little present from yourself, it’s just the sort of thing that takes a day from “meh” to “nice”. Pictured is a Freedom Bakery copenhagen, which, all almondy and flaky and raisiny, is my go-to, but we also have a whole range of things that might be a great treat for you: chocolate, lemons, vegan butter, foraged mushrooms, fancy salt. You know what would make your day- why not make it? 

And 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 butter beans, 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.

Meat

We’ve recently given our monthly meat boxes a makeover. They’re still full of organic high-welfare meat from Scottish farms, but now they offer more variety, with each month centering on a theme (while still including some perennial basics). June’s theme was charcuterie,  and July’s will be barbeques. We order our meat well in advance to make sure the farms can fulfil our orders, so if you’d like to subscribe to a meat box beginning in July, email now for more info and to check avaliability.

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

We’re in the middle of a heatwave, with temperatures crossing the 20 degree mark. That’s serious heat for Glasgow, and oh, isn’t the city almost heartbreakingly pretty on a sunny day? Everyone comes out to celebrate and the sandstone glows.  And as you walk down the street or through the park, an unmistakable summer scent reaches you, drifting on the breeze: someone, somewhere, is having a barbeque. Perhaps you hear ice clinking in glasses, laughter ringing gently over a garden fence, kids playing. Barbeques being outside mean they’re one of the safer ways to get together, so I think this stretch of sun is a perfect time to make the most of this time-limited joyous way of cooking. Next month’s meat boxes will focus on cuts for barbequing, so email now to secure one if you’d like to grill some organic, high-welfare meat in July. For now, however, we can have a think about what we can make with our veg boxes. It isn’t hard: there’s so much delicious veg that needs very little work done to make it BBQ-ready.  A great place to start is courgettes and aubergines. Courgettes can be grilled simply and marinated with lemon and mint or made into a salad with labneh and a savoury granola. Brush aubergines with miso before grilling for a salty, moreish flavour that will complement almost anything, or turn grilled slices into a Malaysian-inspired salad. Barbeque red peppers whole or in halves for a deep caramelised flavour. Pair carrots with harissa paste to celebrate them- our rainbow carrots would look amazing fresh off the grill. Wrap slices of potato in foil to barbeque them.  And on the side? Salads! Find a roundup of grated and shredded raw salads here, a good selection of potato salads here and some leafy salad thoughts here.

Impact Survey

If you’ve been shopping with us for a while, you might already know that we have been working with the Real Farming Trust and the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience on a project exploring our social impacts. Questions we asked in customer surveys last year included the reasons why people choose us, where else they shop, and what influences those decisions. During the first lockdown we ran a short survey asking how it was affecting activities like shopping and cooking, whether it was triggering other changes, and where Locavore fitted in. A year on, we’d like to invite you to take part in a follow-up survey which revisits some of those questions, exploring similar themes around how and why people shop with us, and asking what changes triggered by the lockdowns might have stuck, as well as asking for more general feedback on the experience of shopping with Locavore. The answers you give will help us continue to build our understanding of what’s important to our customers, as well as giving us pointers on what else we could be doing as we move into our next stage of development.  If you’d like to take part, you’ll find the surveyhere– and thank you!