Week 46: What's happening?
We've been making a lot of turmeric and ginger drinks at home this week - this turmeric milk is lovely - very excited to have organic fresh turmeric in the shop this week, have only ever used the powder before but the fresh stuff is GOOD (even if it could be used at Halloween as a fake hand). If you don't want yellow stained fingers (been there), apparently it's ok to not peel it.
It's long been our intention to get an electric van, and Chris went to see one last week that was within our price range but unfortunately it was too small (yep too small even for us, king and queen of small vehicles!), meaning we'd have to change the way we do things quite considerably. The choice of electric vans just isn't out there at the moment, at least at our budget, but we've worked out that we have reduced the amount of fuel used per box to less than 100ml - which we think is quite incredible! Our latest thinking is that we get a bigger diesel van than what we have now, allowing us to get some of our waiting list on to the round, whilst aiming to reduce even further the amount of fuel per box. And kick the electric van can further down the road for now...! Our plan is not to get rid of the trusty little Suzuki... we'll just use it when the weather is treacherous and we need 4 wheel drive.
We finally took down the tomato plants.. so have a lot of green tomatoes in the shop if you fancy making chutney or relish. We're currently in the process of planting out the spinach, salad and chard that has been growing in the green-house in it's place.
This week we've harvested quite a lot of salad... you'll have noticed that this is in plastic bags unfortunately. It's a real challenge at this time of year, we just don't have the space to be able to have enough heads of lettuce to see us through, and so harvesting leaves allows us to be able to get more food out from a given space.
Eat Your Greens veg boxes:
Small boxes have got parsnips, chiogga beetroot, leeks, kale and clementines. Regular boxes have sweet potato, squash, celeriac, cherry tomatoes and salad, January King cabbage, apples. The squashes are mainly White Pearl, the potatoes either Charlotte or red skinned Robinta. The apples are either Adam's Pearmain, Fiesta or Court Pendu Plat!
The Vale Grocer shop:
All veg is either grown by as at Prion (not certified organic but organic principles followed) or by farms who are organically certified. We prioritise UK seasonal veg. Lots in this week, come and help us get through it all. Sorry, not as much fruit this week as we'd hoped, we'll hopefully have lots more of the clementines in coming weeks.
Plenty of: Robinta potatoes, orange / purple carrots, parsnips, red / chiogga / golden beetroot, green / red sprouts (green with red flecks!), chestnut mushrooms, sweet peppers, sweet potato, squash, purple top turnip, swede, celeriac, leeks, brown / pink / red / Roscoff onions (we managed to get some more Roscoff!), purple garlic, fresh turmeric
Limited: cherry tomatoes and some more of the Prion beef tomatoes (plus green tomatoes if anyone wants to make chutney), cauliflower, January King cabbages, some kale and kohlrabi from Prion
Fruit: a few oranges and clementines (sorry, only a few, we're not getting our ordering right at the moment for the citrus but we'll get there and know they're popular!), a few apples, lots of bananas Recipe inspiration:
What about trying celeriac and apple soup? There's a recipe here with bacon too. Some kale recipe ideas here, if you need some ideas - including a kimchi (fermented).Have a lovely week.
have a good week