Domestic goddess rating: 10% (Mother’s Day – so have sat back all day and enjoyed being waited on by my lovely family…. ahhhh) Five-a-day: 5/5 Food miles: about 70
On the menu: Scrambled egg on toast & juice (breakfast); scrummy Sunday roast with friends - roast pork, sprout tops, roast spuds, and forced rhubarb crumble (lunch); couldn’t fit another thing in (supper)
As regular readers will know, I’ve been really struggling to find some of the foods which are currently in season – kale, non-Dutch rhubarb, and I suspect shortly, PSB have all been a bit tricky, and salsify still has me entirely stumped.
So I thought I’d run through a few of the best places I’ve found for getting hold of seasonal food. First on the list: veg boxes.
Before I started growing my own with any modicum of seriousness, we had a year or so when we got a weekly veg box. I can’t remember where ours came from – it was right at the beginning, before they got as popular as they are now - but I do know it brought us nose to nose with some (for us at the time) really wierd veg. It was the first time I’d ever even seen kale, and I remember staring at Jerusalem artichokes in utter puzzlement (it was during this time that we had our horrible experience with these things, so it wasn’t entirely a positive acquaintance).
But we grew to enjoy our little cooking experiments, and to look forward to when our little box of surprises arrived on the doorstep. We did find that we wasted more veg than we would have done normally. It was super-fresh (and tasty) when it arrived, but organic veg isn’t coated with chemicals an’ all so has a natural lifespan – which isn’t very long, a few days at most, so you have to get on and use it. We just weren’t used to eating that many veg, and I think we never quite caught up with the pace – we’d be a lot better at it now.
I’d really recommend them as a way of getting to know some really different tastes and opening your eyes to all sorts of lovely veg. Because most veg box schemes have a farm attached, you know most of the food is local, not imported (keep a wary eye out for any “organic” schemes that actually ship in most of their stuff from Italy et al – it’s probably better for the planet if you just go to your local shops and source UK stuff, arguably whether or not it’s grown organically – but now I’m getting controversial).
I’ve put a few of the best-known veg box schemes over on the right, but if you want to find one that’s closer to you, those nice people at Veg Box Recipes have a find-a-box-scheme section which tells you where to find out where it is. They’ll tell you how to cook what you get in your first box, too.
Filed under: Grow your own, Seasonal eating, healthy eating, the politics of seasonal eating | Tagged: delivery schemes, finding seasonal food, imported food, local food, organic vegetables, sourcing food, veg boxes, where to get seasonal food
