Every week we give you tips on using the new season or unusual veg in the boxes. In this week’s video, find out what to do with cabbage, salad pack, courgettes and artichokes. This week the video is in two parts.
onions: In the spring they were fairly small. This week we have bunched onions in the boxes but in 3 weeks or so we’ll have dried onions.
salad pack We grow a lot of salad leaves in Devon. We put a mixture of them in the salad pack including pak choi, mustard, rocket and other baby leaves but it depends on what has grown well this week. The idea is to get a good blend and balance of flavours, colours, and textures.
hispi cabbage
These sweet cabbages have been growing well this year. Try chopping up and washing them then blanching in hot water with lemon juice, a knob of butter and pepper. In the Field Kitchen we’ve been quartering them, steaming them and putting them with chorizo sausage, capers and parsley.
courgettes
Courgettes have been in season for around a month now and they generally run until the end of August. Try to eat them fresh. Slice them thinly lengthways, add a little bit of oil and salt and pepper, then chargrill them.
My patience with modern technology is not good and I am well known in the office for my computer-induced tantrums, so I would like to apologise to those of you who have suffered such frustrations with our new website. The changeover has been fraught with difficulties and in many ways the old one did the job, so it would be reasonable to ask, as many of you have, why we changed it.
Fundamentally we wanted to make it easier for you to use (by making it more like other websites) and easier for us to keep it updated as crops come in and out of season. We had reached the end of the road with our inflexible and increasingly idiosyncratic old website; every time we wanted to do something new, the “computer said no”. We needed to rejoin the mainstream and follow everyone else with a conventional shopping basket. Carving your own path in IT when your speciality is growing vegetables is not a good idea.
The site is now running much more quickly and we are working on the teething problems. It will be an ever-evolving beast. It is now possible to see all the box contents on one page (a foolish omission) and we have tried to make the checkout process more intuitive. Thanks for staying with us and for the feedback (which wasn’t all negative); it has been useful. I am forever sceptical about claims from the IT industry, but those who know more than I do assure me we are moving in the right direction. If you are having trouble, please give us a call on 0845 600 2311 or 01803 762059; we will be very happy to help.
true spinach This tends to be small leaved and succulent. We also grow spinach beet and swiss chard and you can use them all in similar ways.
True spinach can be washed and cooked as is but if you’re cooking swiss chard or spinach beet, pull the large stalks off. Wash it quickly and cook in a pan over a moderate heat with a lid on.
After 2 or 3 minutes it will collapse on the bottom so you can then turn it over and cook again for another 2 or 3 minutes and then it’s done.
When it’s finished cooking, put it in a colander and run some cold water over to refresh it.
broad beans We’re coming to the end of the broad bean season now but the later ones are usually better quality. If you have the time, you can boil them for 5 minutes then slip them out of the skins.
turnips These summer turnips are very succulent and sweet. It’s usually better to peel them and then you can roast them with carrots.
It’s not always easy to convince children of the joys of fruit and veg. Early this summer The Telegraph said that only one in five children is getting their full ‘five-a-day’. So why won’t some kids eat their greens? We’re setting ourselves – and you – a challenge to find out whether Riverford (and non-Riverford) kids know and like their veg.
school holiday activities
The first part is the Kids’ Veg Challenge itself. Whether you’re a Riverford customer or now, your kids can take the veg challenge at www.kidsvegchallenge.co.uk. We can’t promise that your kids will start gobbling their greens with renewed enthusiasm straight away, but we hope it will get them interested.
The final, ongoing part of the challenge is a series of weekly vegbox-based activities to keep you and your kids busy through the summer. This will be everything from making chocolate beetroot brownies and fruit necklaces to growing your own cress heads. There’ll be plenty to do, make and eat to last through the holidays. If you want to get these weekly activity emails you can choose to receive them at the end of the online veg challenge.
If you have teenagers who want to know more about fruit and veg, try sending them away to Root Camp in Devon this autumn half term. It’s a residential cookery school run by our friend Cassia, where your 14-18 year olds will get hands-on experience working in our fields and learning what to do with the fruits of their labour in the kitchen. You can find out more at www.rootcamp.co.uk.
Despite studying natural sciences at university and absorbing all that Darwinian, evidence-based rationality, I like to think I am still an open minded man. When Raphs, one of our longest standing and more cosmically attuned members of staff suggested focusing positive energy on the artichokes using cups of aluminium filings and a copper wire I gave it a go (still awaiting results). I have sprayed my onions with liquid seaweed (seemed to work) and my cauliflowers with garlic extract (definitely didn’t) without any concrete evidence of efficacy. One winter I even tried to wade my way through the endless, unfathomable sentences of Rudolf Steiner (the father of biodynamic agriculture) in an attempt to get my head around why I should fill a cow horn with excrement and bury it for six months before diluting the contents and spraying them on my crops in the spring. I have not yet let the bloke from the pub, who claims to have invented perpetual motion, retune our tractor engines but I have bought him a drink; who knows, he might be a genius.
Over lunch today, John, our solid, sensible, Arsenal-supporting farm manager, told me he was spraying the drought-stricken celeriac with compost tea
fermented from the worm casts. Reading through the bumph, it seems it will improve yield, root development, disease resistance, colour and even eating quality; a true elixir in the best tradition of a catch-all cure. My dull, reductionist training immediately asks; how will it achieve these remarkable results? By inoculating the soil with beneficial microorganisms it would seem. It sounds like total tosh to me but we will give it a go. As an agnostic in need of evidence, I have suggested a control area be marked off for comparison.
Organic farmers are wholly dependent on the health of their soil. That soil is such a rich and complex ecosystem; a myriad of relationships between hundreds of thousands of different plants, bacteria, fungi and invertebrates as well as water, temperature and the soil minerals themselves. Science has barely begun to understand this complex underworld so it would be arrogant and foolhardy to write off anything that works just because we don’t understand how or why. To deny the inexplicable would be to imply there is nothing new to learn. That would be dull.
Sugar snap peas To prepare, break the end and strip it down and it will take the string out. Take the string off each side and then you can steam or boil (for 3-5 minutes). You also can eat them in a stirfry or raw.
Tomatoes We’ve just come into the tomato season and have had good sunlight so they taste really sweet. Try making your own fresh salsa by chopping them, adding red or fresh onions and a green herb and well as a squeeze of lemon, vinegar and a bit of sugar, salt and pepper. It’s great with tortilla chips or on a courgette fritter.
Bunched carrots
They are tasting fantastic. Don’t bother peeling them. If you want to cook them, theyre great if roast them with kohl rabi. Peel and chop the kohlrabi and roast with the carrots for around 30 minutes.
Spinach
True spinach has fine and succulent leaves. Wash it, leave the water on and cook it in a pan, turn it over, take it out push it into a colander, chop it up finely and then you can use it in all sorts of ways.
Hispi cabbage
Shred these finely, blanch and drain. You could add a squeeze of lemon as well as a little bit of butter and pepper.
Rather than peel bunched carrots, you can just wash them. Try roasting them in the oven with a bit of cumin and then mashing them before adding olive oil and feta.
radish + cucumber (0 mins, 39 secs)
Try thinly slicing the radish and cucumber and mixing it with a bit of smoked fish. You can bind it with some creme fraiche and horseradish.
cherry tomatoes (1 mins, 1 secs)
You don’t have to do too much with these. They go well with mozzarella, so you can slice them up with mozzarella, olive oil and basil.
french beans (1 mins, 42 secs)
The season’s just started so you’ll see a lot more of them over the coming weeks. Top and tail them and blanch in boiling salted water for a couple of water. They need to have a squeak when you bite into them. Try tossing them with shredded slow cooked tomatoes, diced olives and fresh basil.
Our organic salad pack is made up of a mixture of seasonal leaves, freshly picked from our farm. In the summer the leaves grow quickly, usually being picked around 24 days after being drilled.
To drill them, we make a raised bed, with a level surface and go over it with the cheesewire to get the bed clear of weeds. To find out more about the cheesewire, go here. The earlier crop is fleeced to keep it warm and later we use a net to protect it from flea beetle damage and to create shade. We weed it by hand, which can take a lot of effort, but we use an ortomec (belt harvester) to pick it, making harvesting quicker and easier.
Our salad pack is made up of 5 or 6 different leaves, these could be pak choi; ruby streaks mustard; baby leaf lettuce; mixed chard; golden streaks mustard; rocket or tat soi.
To prepare your kohl rabi, trim off the top leaves and stems, trim the base and if it’s large, peel the outer leaves.
One way to use it is to slice it thinly but you can also grate it and put it into an asian coleslaw. If you have pointed cabbage in your box, you can use that instead of the kohl rabi.
Tomatoes (1 min, 30 secs)
For our hot or cold tomato, herb and garlic dressing recipe, click here.
Whether they’re coming from your garden or your vegbox, courgettes are a reliable summer staple; a doddle to grow and versatile in the kitchen. Ours are grown by Andy Hayllor and other members of the South Devon Organic Producers co-op. They do well even in a damp summer and are one of the most vigorous, high-yielding crops of the year. Store your courgettes in a cool place. Although they look fine for a week or more, they lose their flavour quickly and are best eaten within a few days.
cooking
Courgettes can be used in all sorts of dishes; either as the star of a meal or thrown in to bulk out curries, sauces, ratatouille and chillis. You can knock up a simple sauce from courgettes in the time it takes your pasta to cook: grate and cook them in olive oil until soft, then season and add some chopped tarragon and capers. Toss with the pasta and grate over a little lemon zest and parmesan for a quick summery supper. Another simple weeknight idea is to layer sliced tomatoes and courgettes in a gratin dish, sprinkling the layers with a little olive oil, a few oregano leaves and some salt and pepper. Drizzle with a bit more oil and bake for half an hour at 200°C until tender and patched with brown.
Deep-fried courgettes make a moreish treat. First, make a light batter by mixing 150g plain flour with 2 tablespoons of olive oil and enough lukewarm water to make a double cream consistency. Leave to rest for 20 minutes, then just before use, fold in two stiffly whipped egg whites and some seasoning. Cut courgettes into chips, dip them in the batter and deep-fry until light brown. Fresh courgettes can be good in salads too – grate or slice them thinly (squeezing over some lemon juice helps to bring them to life). If you have a favourite recipe for courgettes enter it in our monthly competition on the Riverford Cooks website. Every month the best recipe wins a fruit box, so get your culinary juices going at cooks.riverford.co.uk.
