wotiwrote

We've started getting our fruit and vegetables from a group of organic farms in Devon. The south of England has a series of local franchises who pick up the produce from centralised locations and deliver to your house. So although you place orders over the internet you develop a relationship with the local distributor and it feels like a very personal service. Each week a box arrives and unpacking it is a treat because you don't know quite what's going to be in it. (Except for onions. Boy, do we have a lot of onions!)

The real test is doing stuff with the vegetables. The fact that they taste great - and the fruit, especially the apples, taste like they did when I was a boy - it can be a challenge using them in recipes, primarily because they can often be stuff we don't normally use, like calabrese and squash. To be fair to Riverford they do hekp by supplying a booklet with your first order covering ways of cooking most of the stuff they produce and there's always a recipe for at least one of the vegetables included with every box.

Our usual response when we've run out of ideas is to make a soup. We're eating so much soup now that it's like we're running an evolutionary experiment into what happens to a family over time that no longer use their teeth.

I'm sure we'll have healthy gums, though.