A friend of mine trucked off to Europe and came back with a masters degree in organic food chain management. This spring she told me she was starting a market garden with a weekly veg box. Seeing as my veg seem to feed the groundhog before I can get around to harvesting, it seemed like a good idea to order a box. This is the third week of getting veg from Persephone Market Garden. Once a week I get a box of whatever was in the garden that week.
This week it was zuchinni, parsley, swiss chard, beets lettuce and peas. This is a small box and it costs me $10. Each week I can choose the size I want and have tried all three of small, medium and large. I did a lot of sharing with the medium and large boxes and have settled on what I hope is a good size. With the box of food I also get a weekly newsletter that has recipes for some of the things in the box (radish salad, parsley potatoes, beet salad).
My goal each week is to actually eat all of the veg I get instead of wimping out and passing it to the rabbit to finish up for me. This is a LOT more leafy veg than I would normally eat. It's challenging, but I'm having fun with it. What's left at the end of the week goes into a leftover veg soup. I'd picked up asparagus at the market as well (because what you need when you have a veg box is more veg from the market). I saw Liz's photo of her asparagus soup I begged for the recipe and she sent it through. The asparagus ended up in the first leftover veg soup and the tradition was started. (The fact that I've yet to follow the recipe isn't really the point of the story.)
This week the leftover veg soup uses up leeks from the garden that were going to seed, beets from the box, spring onions, coriander, mustard seed, sesame seed, chickpeas, and stuff? After cooking the leeks in a bit of olive oil I dumped in the rest of the veg and the chicken stock (leftover from a roast) and when everything had softened I took it for a whiz with the hand blender. I topped the soup off with a couple of chunks of brie:
It's rather tasty.
I don't think I could take
I don't think I could take having chunks of brie in my soup but otherwise, the soup looks really tasty. :)
We have something similar to the box-o-veg here and I keep meaning to take advantage of it but I haven't. I need to go dig up the pamphlet I got from them and seriously think about it...
I definitely can give only
I definitely can give only two thumbs WAY UP for veg boxes. A friend of mine has one in the UK and is constantly thinking up new things to cook that he wouldn't otherwise. I also love that the farmer gets all of my money instead of a large portion going to a grocery store or some other "middle man."