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.
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
I made the most amazing salad last week and I can’t stop thinking about it. It was made of lettuce, radishes (sliced thickly), red onion (in little crescent moons), black olives, cherry tomatoes (halved), and green beans (briefly steamed), and I made the most anchovy-laden caesar dressing, the mayonnaise dyed mink with the little grey fish. We had it with some sort of elaborate pasta dish, which was also good, but the salad was by far the star. And this is how I know it really, actually, properly is spring
We all know spring is as elusive as is it is lovely. You can’t trust its warm weather, as it’s as likely to break into snow as it is to last. Early spring is just a hopeful sort of winter, really; winter with more birds. I don’t care how late in the year it’s getting, or whether the clocks have gone forward, or so on or so forth. So what? If I am wanting cold, crunchy fresh bowls of vegetables clashing together in a bowl then it’s spring.
And the veg boxes this week back me up. There’s flat lettuce (with its buttery leaves). There’s cabbage (to shred and dress for a slaw, which is just a subcategory of salad). There’s radishes, red and peppery. There are very early UK tomatoes, not the kind richened by months in the sun but the kind that are fresh and crisp. There is cauliflower, which, roasted with spices, makes a wonderful salad (with crispy chickpeas and a tahini-lemon-garlic dressing? Yes!).
Salads are wonderful because the only way to make a good one is to follow your gut. There are recipes for salads, but they aren’t really necessary. It’s more important to look at the vegetables that are in front of you and choose one you want to eat. Tease out that desire like a bouffant: would it be nice with something creamy? Something sharp? Something crunchy? Something salty? Would it contrast nicely with this other vegetable? Would it pair neatly with this one? And in this way, every well-made salad is a celebration not only of vegetables fresh and delicious, but of the pleasure of choosing them, making decisions about them, and, finally, eating them.