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Summer!
It’s summer at last, and you may want to consider leaving out a cool bag or insulated box for your veg box deliveries when you’re not in. This is especially worth noting if you have milk or other dairy items on your orders. If you want to make any changes to your delivery instructions, please send an email in to us at vegboxes@locavore.scot
Also Summer!
Summer also tends to be a time when the boxes are a bit lighter, as the plentiful produce we have at this time of year tends to be leafy greens, courgettes, and tomatoes- yum- but not as substantial as winters’ root veg. You may want to consider going up a box size for a few months if you’re finding it easy to get through the box fast.
Chard!
We’re at the end of the hungry gap, and our growing sites are starting to see the incredible yields the growers have worked so hard to produce. You can read about how come they manage to grow so much on a small site here. To celebrate the start of the season, you have a bonus bumper bag of chard (or kale) in your veg box next week- isn’t that exciting? There are some great recipes for chard in this old newsletter.
Also Chard!
We also have lots from our farm available to add this week: chard and kale, chives and dill, bulbs of fresh garlic, snow pea shoots, and salad leaves. It doesn’t get fresher or more local than this.
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
I bought a cheap ice-cream maker right around the start of the pandemic, my sweet-toothed substitute for the sourdough panic. I half-expected it to be something I used two or three times, then let it get dusty for a while before giving it away. But actually making ice-cream was immediately a solace and has stuck around for me as a peaceful, delightful kitchen activity. More surprising still, I’ve found it to be an activity that complements my veg box beautifully, as odds and ends of fruit turn into sorbets, and herbs (mint, bay leaves, thyme) infuse gently into milky bases overnight before churning up into the most delicate of delicacies. Ice-cream concentrates flavours, lets them sing every note of their unique song, so that it becomes possible to appreciate every aspect of an ingredient we might otherwise think of as incidental.
Forgotten parts of fruit and veg can also be celebrated, as Kitty Travers of La Grotta Ices teaches with two incredible recipes. The first is noyaux ice-cream, which uses the seed inside the pit of an apricot. This is closely related to and tastes very much like almonds- if anything, it tastes almondier than almonds. The second recipe is pea-pod milk ice, which finds delicious sweetness in a part of a vegetable usually destined for the compost. Now, we don’t have peas in their pods in the boxes this week, but we do have broad beans, and if anyone wants to find out whether their pods will do as a substitute, please be sure to send me a thorough review. I suspect it will be a very rewarding endeavour.
If you don’t fancy making ice-cream but still want to find a use for broad bean pods I’ll refer you to this recipe for broad bean fritters. Are you keen for a cold treat but don’t have an ice-cream maker? Granita is way easier than hand-churning, and since it’s so simple you can experiment with a recipe to your heart’s content- here’s a recipe for peach granita to get you started. Sorbet, similarly, is a whole world of delight waiting to be discovered: here’s a plum sorbet for using up fruit, and here’s a blackcurrant-and-thyme one as a suggestion for the blackcurrants from our farm in the XL fruit bags.
Photo: “Parsley Ice-Cream” by Rebecca Siegel, CC BY 2.0. You can find a recipe for parsley ice-cream here.