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

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!

Jamie Oliver has had some success transforming the way UK schools feed our children and now he wants to show the US how to feed their children. Jamie’s got his bad points but he’s pretty much a hero in my opinion. OK, so we might see him as being in the pocket of the big supermarkets but his heart is undoubtedly in the right place. If Jamie can persuade people that children can and do like vegetables then he will have done well.

I’m not at all sure how we reached this place where it’s just assumed that children don’t like veg. It seems quite strange to me, I always had more trouble getting them to eat meat! I suppose I was dealing with children who had mostly started off as vegetarian and been weaned onto vegetable solids. My bible was Rose Elliot’s Vegetarian Mother and Baby, I’d read Let’s Have Healthy Children (out of print and not that accurate) and I had a few tricks up my sleeve. Veggies make great weaning finger foods (carrots are obvious but try sticks of celariac or fennel!), mashed avacado is just about a perfect weaning food, and once they are a little bit older salad or pizza faces that they decorate themselves will usually be demolished in double quick time.

Vegetable box

Anyway, listen to what Jamie has to say and then take another look at what came in this week’s vegetable box and see what you can do to make it attractive to your kids. If you are stuck for ideas just leave a comment and I’ll try to come up with something.

For more than 30 years John Jeavons has been preaching the benefits of small-scale, sustainable farming. Now, on a farm just outside Willits, Jeavons operates the nonprofit Ecology Action and teaches his methods to gardeners from as far away as Siberia, Africa and Latin America.

It takes about 15,000 to 30,000 square feet of land to feed one person the average U.S. diet,” he says. “I’ve figured out how to get it down to 4,000 square feet. How? I focus on growing soil, not crops.

In 1972, John Jeavons formed Ecology Action and started farming nearly four acres in Palo Alto. Alan Chadwick, pioneer of the French intensive/biodynamic method of farming, came up from Santa Cruz to teach classes. The first edition of “How to Grow More Vegetables” was published two years later. At last, Jeavons was finding answers to the question he’d been asking farmers for years.

He took the best of Chadwick’s intensive farming techniques, including double-digging, composting and closely-spaced planting, and added a few ideas of his own. An organic farm should be a closed system, he reasoned. Off-the-farm inputs like manure, bagged compost, alfalfa meal and liquid kelp all require additional land, water and resources to produce. That, in Jeavon’s view, is hardly sustainable agriculture.

8 steps to grow more vegetables via biointensive gardening

• Double-dug, raised beds.

Loosening the soil to a depth of 24 inches allows roots to penetrate more deeply and creates a raised bed effect. Sounds like hard work? John Jeavons’ video “Dig It” demonstrates an Aikido-style movement that makes double-digging almost effortless.

• Composting. A healthy compost pile is key to replenishing the soil.
• Intensive planting.

“Ignore the spacing instructions that come with your seeds,” Jeavons says “Plant seedlings so close that when they are mature, the leaves touch. This keeps soil moist and prevents weeds from sprouting.

• Companion planting.

Green beans love strawberries, corn provides shade to cucumbers, and fast-maturing radishes grow well in between slower-growing carrots.

• Carbon farming.

Corn, millet and oats, along with other seed and grain crops, make up an important part of the diet and provide plenty of high-carbon additions to the compost pile.

• Calorie farming.

Growing a year’s food supply means focusing on high- calorie, space-efficient foods like potatoes and parsnips.

• Open-pollinated seeds.

Special hybrids aren’t needed in healthy soil, Jeavons says. Using open-pollinated seeds like the ones offered in his Bountiful Gardens Catalog helps preserve genetic diversity.

• Use the whole method.

Jeavons emphasizes that high yields come from using all Grow Biointensive components together.

So there we have a system which enables anybody to grow more vegetables on less land, as long as you do the whole thing .

So I had in my vegetable racks and fridge:

Two sacks of lovely potatoes.

Two enormous cauliflowers

Enough broccoli to sink a battleship

Just the right amount of onions, probably

Half a field of carrots

Lots of lovely lovely leeks

A couple of nice dark green cabbages

I may have forgotten something but if so, I’m sure it was delicious

Now then, Riverford claim about the roots and greens box “The veg has a good shelf life, so if you’re feeling extra thrifty try a fortnightly delivery.”  which is what I effectively had to cope with. I chose to cook one of the cauliflowers first, grated some carrots for a salad and started to munch my way through the broccoli. Potatoes keep for weeks in the dark so I didn’t worry about them too much.  After the end of teh first week I could see an of the two boxes end in sight. The second cauliflower had developed a mouldy patch but only in one isolated segment, the rest was fine. The carrots were in extraordinarily good condition. Supermarket carrots go limp after a couple of days when kept out in a room with variable temperature but these were still crisp and juicy. The leeks lasted well two. No need to peel away several layers of yellow leaves, just trim the ends a little bit.

The controversy has been raised: is it better to keep the bunched carrots with the green feathery top foliage intact or cut them off?

I think the greens help to transpose moisture away from the carrot roots so they dry out more quickly but Linda thinks keeping the greens on will mean they last longer. Probably we’ll eat them with a couple of days anyway but it’s important to know what is really the best way to keep these special vegetables in tip top condition for even a short time.

What do you think is best and what do you do with bunched carrots from your organic vegetable boxes?

The opposite happened to me though. I thought I’d been efficient and cancelled my regular vegetable box for the week I was away recently, and when I got back the next week’s box of vegetables arrived exactly when it was suppose to, but the week after that I was left without. So make sure you understand the difference between a future order and a recurring order before you cancel organic boxes.

* Green chillies : Don’t put the raw green chillies straight in the fridge. To keep them fresh for a long time remove the stems and put them in a ziplock bag or in some storage box.
* Carrots: Cover the carrots with a damp cloth and put them in fridge. They can keep for a whole week like that instead of going soft and limp in a few days.
* Herbs: Bunches of coriander have to be one of the common one to go bad before you get to use it all. To keep them fresh I store them in a salad container so the leaves don’t touch the icy wall at the back and get frostbite. You can use the same tip for greens too.
* Brocoli: When you store brocoli look for dark green buds with no yellowish color. And store them in a airtight container or in a sealed bag and it will last up to a week. Don’t store more than a week.
* cucumbers: Pick the ones that have no soft spots or visible bruises. It should be dark green and firm, So it will last longer in the fridge when you store it in the air tight bag. It will stay fresh up to 5 days, but really it’s probably better to take it out of the plastic wrap and use it sooner rather than later.

When you are stocking organic vegetables in your refrigerator, make a list of them and stick it in your fridge door. That way when you are trying to make up your mind on what to cook you can quickly decide on what to use first and avoid wasting vegetables that go bad faster. I hope these tips are useful for making the best use of your precious vegetables from the organic vegetable boxes.