Veg Box Newsletter 18th January: Cook Book

The Online Veg Box Shop is Open!

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

Seville oranges sold out really quickly last week and lots of us didn’t manage to snap any up. So we’ve got them again this week, and plenty of them, so it’s not too late to make your marmalade

From the foragers, we have the incredibly-named Scarlet Elf Cup, which sounds like some sort of etherial Mario Kart tournament to me. But, actually, it’s a gorgeous, tasty mushroom. Read about them here, and please note that to be on the safe side it’s best to eat these mushrooms cooked.

And as always, we have all the staples to get you through the week: bread, beans, olive oil, pasta…

The deadline to get your orders in is 11pm Monday.

Headlines

Covid-19

You can read about changes made to our service due to the pandemic here


Please return your veg box!

Just a reminder of what we collect from your door each week: 

Veg 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. 

If you collect your orders from the shop, you can return them there. 

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

I got a new cookbook for Christmas, Nigella’s new one. I love it, and have hardly shut it since the new year, cooking from it continually. A good cookbook is almost intimate, teaching you as it does to repeat the movements of its author to make something that they ate. It takes you outside of your own perspective and preferences and shows you another way of cooking and eating, something I need very much in this long stretch of cooking only for myself and my household. As the year is in its quiet, fruitful time when we have a good deal of lovely veg but not much in the way of new, exciting produce, I thought it might be a nice moment to think about cookbooks, and the ones I reach for most often when I want a new way of approaching something in my veg box or fruit bag. I’m a creature of habit, so regular readers will know all these names and some of these books and be utterly unsurprised. But that’s nice, right? To have an ongoing, longstanding companionship with a recipe book. 

The Green Roasting Tin, Rukimi Iyer
When I first saw the Roasting Tin books, I am ashamed to say I raised an eyebrow doubtfully – books themed around one way of cooking are rarely that good. But this series is truly excellent, fitting into the way we really cook and eat most of the time: in a hurry, distracted, spontaneously, but also delightedly, hungrily. Green is the book of vegetarian and vegan recipes- half and half- and accordingly is very veg-focused, so helpful when you have a box of vegetables that needs to turn into an interesting and enjoyable dinner with minimal effort. 

East, Meera Sodha
This is the book I reach for when I am simply bored  of squash, or swede, or sprouts. If you’re out of ideas for beetroot, try the claypot noodles with beetroot and smoked tofu. Uninspired by cabbage? Vietnamese coconut pancakes, bunny chow, or mouth-numbing noodles might help make it a little more exciting to see one peeking out of your veg box. All vegetarian and mostly vegan, this is a must-have for those of us who believe local ingredients don’t need to limit you to local flavours. 

La Grotta Ices, Kitty Travers
This is more for those fruit-bag gluts than the veg box ones (although pea-pod milk ice says different). Whatever fruit you love as is, it’ll be even better churned up into an ice-cream or sorbet, and learning how to make these amazing, playful ice-creams is the perfect project. I bought a cheap ice-cream maker and this book at the beginning of the first lockdown and spent the year making ice-creams flavoured with apricots, mangoes, seville oranges, grapefruit, apples. Cooking from this book is like daydreaming. 

Power Vegetables, Peter Meehan
This is an American cookbook, so go into this one ready to translate zucchini into courgette and eggplant into aubergine. It’s not vegetarian but is vegetable-focused, and looks always for those vegetable recipes so interesting, delicious, and impactful that nothing is missing for the most dedicated of meat-eaters. I’d include this in any list of my favourites just for introducing me to mujadara via its courgette-and-shallot version, which is now just about my favourite lentilly thing to eat.