Red onion squash is one of the more unusual and dramatic treats you might find in one of your vegetable boxes. It looks delightful but I can’t help wondering what exactly I’m going to do with it. At first glance it looks remarkably pumpkin like and I feel a tinge of disappointment. I’m not a pumpkin fan. However I love butternut squash, especially in butternut squash risotto, so maybe this will have a similar texture?

A bit of research and I discover that red onion squash are also known as red kuri squash and are much loved in Japan. They have a velvety texture and are quite dry compared to the watery pumpkin. They are said to have a firm flesh with a slight chestnut flavour. OK, I’m feeling much more cheerful now! The French even call them Potimarron (marron meaning chestnut, of course).

More than that they are full of goodness.  A good source of fibre they also contain a range of vitamins, potassium and iron. Red onion squash are low in purines and full of beta-carotene.

I thought I’d try using them in a variation on my old favourite, 3 Potato Spiced Roast. This recipe is so old I’ve no idea where I got it and it is endlessly flexible depending on what root vegetables are available. I know it says 3, and I suppose it must have been originally but it has drifted over the years. I’ll just use what I’ve got, which on this occasion is going to be red onion squash, leeks, turnip (that’s swede if you are English) and potato.  You could try parsnips, sweet potato or even carrot if you’ve got nice big ones.

Spiced, roasted red onion squash and friends

Cut the squash into melon slices and scoop out the seeds first. I might turn them into chew strew later. Then cut them up into bigish chunks, maybe around 2″? We don’t want small dice we are definitely after hearty chunks!  My research suggests the red skins are edible once roasted so I’m going to leave them on.

Cut the leeks, turnip and potato into chunks about the same size as the squash pieces.

Tip them all into a shallow oven proof tray. I tend to use an old orange china Le Creuset one but whatever you’ve got will be fine.

Now for the herbs and spices. I’m going to use a couple of sprigs each of rosemary and thyme as I think they will combine well with the chestnutty flavour. I’ll chop them finely.

Then roast a few cumin and coriander seeds in a dry pan till they just start to pop.

Chop up a fresh red chilli and a couple of cloves of garlic. I’ll probably throw in a few whole garlic cloves to roast at the same time. Yum!

Put the herbs, spices, garlic and chilli into a small bowl , add some freshly ground black pepper and cover with olive oil.

Pour this mixture over the vegetables and stir until everything is well coated.

Pop the whole lot into a fairly hot oven. Baste every 10 minutes or so, turning the veg as you do so.

It should take about 35 to 40 minutes.

Serve hot straight away.  You can serve it with meat but I think it is yummy just on its own. If you really must add protein try adding some chopped devilled nuts, sunflower seeds, or even pumpkin seeds!

I will let you know how I got on.

Video explains all about the different types of squash that may appear in your vegetable boxes

Organic or local boxes?

I’ve written a little about this before and had a couple of lovely guest posts on the subject of Local Veg Boxes but I’ve never looked seriously at finding a more local supplier myself. This is one dilemma I’m finding it really hard to resolve. I find the whole subject of food miles quite confusing. There doesn’t seem to be one definitive agreed standard for working them out so it is really difficult to be sure you are comparing like with like. I suppose my heart says local must be better but my head is less convinced. There have been some brave experiments in trying to eat locally by people based in London but I’m not convinced it is really practical. (One word of warning – search for “eat local  London” will bring up some really interesting blogs, full of details of great farmers markets and local suppliers. From London. Ontario! )

I do try to use my local farmers market every month. It has to be said though, the vegetable produce comes all the way from Oxfordshire, so not really more local than my box scheme. One study reported on the BBC suggested that the best thing would be to eat food grown within a 20 mile radius. The professor involved did admit:

“In the short term, our paper adds to consumer frustration,” Professor Lang concedes.

No kidding? Sigh….. Well that was back in 2005 but I’m not sure things got any clearer!

We, as you will know if you follow the blog, use the Riverford organic vegetable box scheme and I’m very happy with the quality of the produce. However, it can hardly be described as local to East London. The food we get comes up from Devon in big trucks and is then distributed by small local delivery franchisees. If you are in another region your Riverford box might come from their Yorkshire farm or one of their other farms. In terms of carbon footprint and emissions they make a good case for this method of distribution. But still, not that local.

Some of the food is imported from France and Spain. Riverford are very scrupulous about reporting that. Their website goes into considerable detail to explain exactly why sometimes importing food is actually a better use of resources than trying to grow the same food here.  They have a fascinating description of why it is better to transport tomatoes from Spain by truck than to grow them under plastic in the UK. They say:

The emissions from transporting those tomatoes (from Spain or Italy) to the UK (about 240g CO₂ per kg of fruit) are about a tenth of those associated with growing them closer to home using heat.  The situation for peppers which are lower yielding but require the same amount of heat per square meter is even worse at about 4.5kg of CO₂ per kg of fruit.

But Which is Best, Local or Organic?

Back to the original question then. If I could find a more local vegetable box scheme would that be better then organic? I had a look round and found to my surprise that I just might be able to have my organic cake and eat it too. The Hornbeam Cafe in Walthamstowe act as a pick up point for OrganicLea. They say they do weekly, mostly locally sourced organic vegetable boxes. The veg can be picked up after 2:30 each Wednesday. Worth further investigation? Maybe.

I’m busy working out if I can get there after teaching on Wednesdays when I decide to look at little more deeply at their box contents. Erm…. The last box they have details for on the site is for the end of September. This does not bode well. The box does have some local produce but it also says:

Produce from: Hughes Organics and small farmers in East
Anglia, Sarah Green in Essex and our growing site (Hawkwood)
in Chingford, and from Langridge Organic wholesalers.(my formatting)

Further investigation also reveals suppliers in Norfolk and Linconshire. Not very local then really, though they do have some grapes and figs that were grown in Tottenham. (It’s been an amazing summer!) In fact quite a few suppliers are further away than Riverford and I really don’t like the use of an organic wholesaler. Their produce could be from anywhere!

My options seem quite limited then. To be more local we’d have to grow our own veg, not very practical in a small garden and you still have to get through the unproductive winter, move (!), or stick with a vegetable box from one of the big boys, the best of which, for now, seems to be Riverford.

Posted as part of Blog Action Day 2011

Later I made these drinks for my family & numerous other children over the years and they were very popular. Orange and Lemon Barely Water is first on the list as it was always my favourite.

Dilute it by at least 50% in the glass and add ice.

Nana’s Orange & Lemon Barley Water

Nothing like the stuff you buy in the shops from that well known brand. This is refreshing and nutritious. Even so, it’s not for every day, but perfect for hot summer days and holidays. It brings back memories of tents in the garden, long summer days and grown ups having something in their drink that wasn’t in mine!

This is a messy job. Clean hands, clean surfaces and an apron are all important. (See it even gives you an excuse to buy a pretty apron and play Domestic Goddess!)

The big old fashioned mixing bowls are great for this job. You can use either a glass or wooden lemon squeezer. Don’t use metal stuff for fruit as it can make it taste funny.

BTW – child labour is perfect for squeezing oranges & lemons. Older children can also be taught to remove the rind.

We’re using elegant tea cups here as a measure. Nana’s was good china but had a broken handle. You could use a mug, I suppose, but a cup is better. Nana didn’t like scales – too much washing up!

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup of organic pot barley
• 10 cups of water
• 2 organic, unwaxed lemons
• 6 organic unwaxed oranges
• A small amount of organic honey to taste

Method

1. Simmer the barley in the water for about an hour.
2. While it simmers cut the fruit into halves and juice it. This is easily done with an old fashioned lemon squeezer. Give each one a roll on a wooden board first to loosen the juice & start to break it down. Don’t follow any fancy tips about microwaving it first to get more juice. You’ll destroy all that lovely vitamin C!
3. Peel the rinds from the fruit. You can use a potato peeler but make sure you just get the rind not the white.
4. Add the rinds to the simmering water
5. Leave to cool
6. Strain the cooled water into a large bowl. Throw away the barley (ouch – if you have any good ideas what to do with it leave a comment! I put out for the birds. Then throw it away!)
7. Add the fruit juice
8. Taste and add a little (as little as you can) honey
9. Pour it in a covered jug
10. Keep it in the fridge

Serving Suggestions

A tall cold glass, ice & a slice of lemon.

If serving it in a glass jug you could add slices of fruit or a sprig of fresh tarragon.

Also tastes great from tin mugs if glamping! Decant into screw top bottle and take it on picnics with you but don’t keep it for more than a day without a fridge.

Oh, and if it’s for a special garden party,  those grown ups might try it with a dash of gin or vodka (personally I’d add it to a little Ricard!) but then grown-ups are very naughty like that

[Photo Credit CC Brandon C Warren]

Organic Fruit

Well, we discovered that drinking fruit juice is not at all the same as eating whole fruit, and that so called fresh ‘not from concentrate’ fruit juice is not what it seems.

First, the worst thing about industrial ‘fresh’ Orange Juice:

Flavour Packs : The Secret Ingredient In Your Orange Juice

That’s right, they are adding back flavour and smell to stored orange juice and they don’t even have to mention anything about it on the label. This is because the things they add back are ‘derived’ from natural oranges. This can’t be right, can it? And don’t even get me started on what they do to apple juice to stop it turning brown.

But it gets worse. Just read what that innocent looking orange juice can do to your health:

And now, the health implications of even the best type of bought orange juice:

In April 2008 a study in the journal Diabetes Care, looked at the diets of 70,000 women as part of the ongoing Nurse’s Health Study, and found that unlike daily consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables, which was associated with an 18 per cent reduction in the risk of diabetes, consumption of fruit juice even in small daily amounts, was associated with an overall 18 per cent increased risk of the disease.

Juice, unlike the whole fruit, contains all the sugars but less of the cofactors found in the whole fruit that help the body metabolise them. This association was strong and independent of other health factors and was higher for those who had a daily glass of orange juice (which raises the risk of diabetes by 24 per cent) than those who had a daily glass of cola or other sweetened soft drink (which raised it by between 6 and 15 per cent).

This was the first study of its kind and such findings are challenging to much that we think we know. For instance orange juice is almost universally hailed as a healthy drink because of its useful levels of antioxidants, but few realise that it contains the same amount of sugar as a glass of cola. If your diet is already high in sugar – like most of those in the Western world, orange juice may simply add to that burden without conferring any real benefit.

…

So is organic orange juice a better option? The answer is yes – and no. Growing organic oranges does not involve the use of pesticides and fertilisers and therefore it may have a lower carbon footprint and lower impact on the environment. However if it comes in a carton or bottle it will have gone through the same industrial process as non-organic juice and is therefore still less nutritious than eating an actual orange or squeezing juice from an organic orange for yourself.

Organic standards of course do not legislate for how the workers are treated. Your organic fruit juice may well still have been picked by an exploited child who should have been in school.

If you absolutely need orange juice, then squeezing it fresh at home from an organic fruit may be your healthiest and most environmentally friendly option.

– Behind the Label: orange juice

So we should all be buying those expensive juicers and making our own OJ then? Well no, not really. Although freshly squeezed juice is lovely, and better than the processed stuff, juice really isn’t all that good for you in many ways. Juicing allows you to consume far more than you ever would if you were eating whole fruit. When was the last time you sat down & ate 5 or 6 oranges at a sitting? That’s an awful lot of fructose (fruit sugar) for the body to cope with, before we even think about what the acid might be doing to your teeth.

Ironically you might be better with old fashioned home-made lemonade than ‘healthy’ juice. I’ll post my recipe for my Nana’s Home-made Still Lemonade later and I might also include her Lemon Barley Water as a bonus.

Ideally, though, eat your organic fruit as part of a meal and drink water if you want a cold drink. Keep it in a covered jug in the fridge, flavour it with a slice of lemon or lime and a sprig of mint. Serve it in pretty glass with ice and it will feel like a treat.

Ecoworks Vegboxes- The Nottingham box scheme with added social aims

Local veg box scheme

Ecoworks has been delivering veg boxes in Nottingham for over 18 months now, and we like to think we’re getting pretty good at it. Ecoworks is an environmental community organisation established back in 1992, with the key aim of helping socially-disadvantaged people to enjoy and improve their local environment. Since then we have taken on 13 projects, all aiming to make Nottingham a more vibrant, inclusive and beautiful place to live.

Our vegboxes form a cornerstone of this work. We use them to promote the local-food movement, bringing its benefits to a much wider range of communities and giving people access to a healthier lifestyle without paying through the nose for supermarket organics. Our boxes (well, they’re green bags actually!) contain a mixture of fruit, vegetables, herbs and salad that are a healthy and affordable option for the all people of Nottingham.

Alongside the obvious environmental benefits of a local vegbox scheme, all of Ecoworks’ projects aim to increase social inclusion too, ensuring that people on low incomes can play an active part in our society’s transition to sustainability. That’s our key aim. The business-ey types out their might even call it our “unique selling point”.

All we know is that the environment and communities are integrated in a very fundamental way. This isn’t anything hippy or “new age” necessarily- it just makes sense. Every environmental problem is rooted in a social problem. Environmental sustainability can only go hand-in-hand with social inclusion.

In our vegbox scheme these values are at the forefront of our work- essentially what we do is sell full price vegboxes to those with decent incomes and then use any profit from that to subsidise boxes for those on low incomes or the unemployed. That way, everyone gets a chance to be part of the local-food movement

Our key aims in providing vegboxes:

To make quality local produce affordable-
for those who are unemployed or on low income, it costs £3.50 per week for a small bag suitable for 2 people, or £7 per week to feed 3-4. If customers are lucky enough to have a job, we ask for £5 and £10 respectively. This is still cheaper than supermarket organics, and allows us to keep subsidising those who can’t afford more.

To really reduce food miles-
On the most part, our produce is grown in Nottingham and eaten in Nottingham. Proper local. When joining our box scheme customers can choose from one of 10 collection points around Nottingham. We worked out that if we were to aim for super convenience like the Riverford’s of the vegbox world and deliver door-to-door, we would end up chugging our van over 100 miles around the city each week. With the collection point system (at libraries, community centres and some housing co-operatives around the city) we can truly minimize the carbon-footprint of our produce. We’ve found this also has a side effect of getting people more involved with their local community centres!

To support local communities-
The produce in our vegboxes is grown by local people, the majority of it on our gardens in Nottingham. They provide an  income for a host of local growers, whilst ensuring that we are able to continue our work with socially disadvantaged people in Nottingham.

Want to try one? Well, just take a look at www.ecoworks.org.uk for more information and to order yours. Alternatively you can give us a call on 0115 962 2200, send an email to vegboxes@ecoworks.org.uk, or even better come and visit us and see the gardens for yourselves! (guest post by Chris Pryke)

Today we have a guest post from Tom Howlett explaining just why we should all think about just who we buy our veg box from.

If you are looking for a veg box you have to make, what I believe to be one fundamental choice. Do you find a small local scheme or go for one of the 2 larger national companies.

Britain is becoming dominated by 2 large national veg box schemes (Riverford and Able and Cole). They do an amazing job of combining the benefits of a local veg box with real convenience. They make veg boxes more easily consumable by providing recipe cards and making videos of how to prepare the more unusual weirdly shapes things you’ll find lurking at the bottom of your box. They have done a great job of bringing veg boxes to the masses through their funky marketing. They provide a huge range of products and you can change your order online. But I don’t think they are the real deal. Here’s why.

We don’t just choose a veg box for the fantastically fresh seasonal produce. A local veg box connects us with our local farmers. Our hard-earned cash isn’t filling the pockets rich businessmen, it’s helping local people earn an honest living from the land.

Many local veg box scheme’s purity means they include a more limited range of produce then the national schemes. The ever-changing seasons mean we are delivered an ever-changing variety of vegetables. On good days we discover fantastic new recipes. On bad days we struggle to find a use for 3 swedes and a beetroot. All year round we are challenged to find recipes for a new seasons produce; its part of the fun and help us regain our connection with the cyclic nature of our environment.

Buying veg boxes online

What about convenience? If you want to change your order with a local scheme you usually need to make a telephone call, although more personal, it’s easy to forget and at times it can go wrong. The large schemes spend 1000′s on online systems that allow customers to change their order week by week, encouraging them to buy more and giving the company the opportunity to sell a wider range of produce and provide a viable more ethical alternative to a supermarket shop. At From Where It’s Grown we are providing local veg box schemes with solutions that match the sophistication of the big 2′s systems for a small monthly fee.

So if you are faced with this choice do at least find out about and give your local veg box scheme a try. If they don’t offer what you are looking for tell them what the need to do to win your custom, I think they will appreciate your candour. Local veg box schemes are a unique type of business. They are driven by beliefs not money, They deserve our support.

So there you are, will you think really local when it comes to buying your  veg box?

Bean and Fennel Bake

You will need:

• About a cup of cooked beans. I like Aduki beans for this. Please don’t use tinned beans they go to mush too quickly and don’t give the right texture.
• About 2 cups of fairly finely chopped selection of organic veggies from your box. Ideally about 1/4 inch dice. I’ve used onion, leek, celery and carrot today. Other possibles include swede ( better known as turnip if you’re Scots like me!)
• 1 large fennel bulb chopped a little larger.
• 2 cloves of garlic
• Herbs to taste – today it’s thyme and parsley. Rosemary would also work and some people (not me!) like sage. Marjoram might work better if you are swapping the shoyu gravy for tomato sauce (homemade of course!)
• 1 cup of shoyu gravy (2 tablespoons of shoyu or good soy sauce added to a white sauce made with  boiling water not milk. See below)
• About 4 or 5 good sized potatoes mashed with a tablespoon of olive oil
• Optional – cheese about a tablespoon of parmesan or gruyere added to the mash.

Method

1. Heat a little olive oil over a low heat in a skillet, deep frying pan or similar. Add the veggies, fennel and garlic and cook gently with a lid on. Sometimes described as ‘sweating’ the vegetables. Cook till the juices start to run and the veggies soften. Not something you can wander off and leave! Keep cooking, checking and stirring occasionally for about 15 mins till the veggies are all nice and soft but still have some crunch. You might need to taste them, just to make sure of course! Remove from the heat.
2. Make a shoyu gravy. In a small sauce pan heat 3 teaspoons of olive oil. Add 1 tablespoon of flour (organic white or gram are both good). Cook gently stirring all the time until it makes a solidish mass & comes away from the sides of the pan. Add 2 tablespoons of Shoyu and stir well. I like to use one of those wooden spoons with a pointy edge and a hole in them, a balloon whisk is good too. Gradually add about 1/2 a pint of boiling water. You can use vegetable stock or water left over from cooking other veg instead, if you have it. Stir it all the time over a gentle heat till it thickens & will coat the back of a spoon.
3. Add the sauce to your cooked vegetables. Mix really well so that everything is coated. Resist the temptation to eat it now! Or is that just me…….
4. Top with your mashed potatoes. Roughen the top with a fork and add extra cheese or butter if you are feeling indulgent.

At this point it will keep for later or even tomorrow, if you pop it in the fridge. You could even freeze it! Just move it to the fridge the day before you want to eat it.  Make sure you get it out of the fridge a good hour before you want to cook it.

5. Pop it in a medium oven for around 40 minutes till heated through and the topping has gently coloured, golden brown is ideal. Watch it for the last 10 minutes or so as it’s a short step from golden brown to cinders!

Enjoy!

I tend to serve it with some sort of greens, the first of the sprouts are in boxes now and they are perfect with this!

A school buying group makes fresh, local, ethically-
produced food more accessible to its members, and
supports local farmers by providing them with a local,
regular and reliable outlet. A school food co-op can also support other programmes such as Healthy Schools,
Eco Schools and Food For Life.

In 2009 we posted 16 blog posts on the Organic boxes blog, and munched our way through about 47 organic boxes ourselves, as well as three half cases of red wine, some bread and eggs.

In 2010 we hope to continue expanding the world of organic vegetable box delivery schemes.