Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Today I got my second veggie box! Much excite was had.

( What was in Box 1 (29 May) )

Cooked from box one (with, of course, other stuff I already had or bought along the way):

Roast Tomato Pasta
A fairly boring leftover soup (leftover curried veg, with the leek and garlic and some celery)
Leek and zucchini pasta with lemon-yoghurt sauce (and the fresh garlic)
Red leaf salad with lemon viniagrette, which also accounted for half the radishes
Red leaf salad with sweet potato and green beans
A spicy lamb stir fry, which used another third of the beans
Any Fruit Galette with one of the apples and some strawberries I had to hand
Risotto with sautéed mushrooms in brown butter with balsamic vinegar, and brown butter radishes (this was delicious, do recommend)
Mustard beef in red wine (adapted from Clarissa Dickson-Wright's Beef in Brown Ale), using up some of the celery, and the stock I had made from the odds and ends
Over a litre of stock from the celery ends, leek ends, and other cut bits and pieces.

I still have: about three small celery stalks, an apple, and a few oranges.

( What's in box 2 (12 June) )

I'm pretty pleased with this delivery: I had been tempted to buy broccoli in last weekend's shop, and I can always use zucchini and snow peas. Fennel was a nice surprise I didn't expect at this time of year.

I was surprised to get capsicum and banana at all - the premise of the subscription service (Ugly Fruits) is that you get items that weren't sold to supermarkets. It doesn't specifically say locally grown, though, now that I look at it: perhaps the bananas and capsicums are excess from a bigger distributor. They also say they buy the morning of delivery, but a. my box definitely gets sorted at 11pm at night the night before, I can track it on the post office site, and b. What I got was exactly what was in the description for 8 June. And they already have the list for 15 June up. It's possible their workflow (and supply chain) has recently changed thanks to COVID - they did a big ad campaign around the start of shutdown and may now have a LOT more boxes to process than they used to.

[Ed: ah. I note the bananas are marked fairtrade, and the kiwis 'from Italy', likewise the oranges. So I'm guessing the company buys stock of popular warm-climate fruits, at least.]

The challenges in this box are:
1. More lettuce
2. Endives. All previous experiments with endives have not been great. I'm going to try sautéeing with balsamic butter, but my previous efforts involved things like bacon and maple syrup, so. May be a lost cause.
3. THAT MANY kiwifruit. What does one do with MANY MANY KIWIFRUIT, other than... make pavlova?

Plans I have for this coming week/fortnight:
- Avocado pasta with... something. I wonder if tomatoes might go nicely on it?
- Pilaf with halloumi, and perhaps some of the broccoli
- pizza, probably with capsicum and zuchini
- Probably another stir-fry
- Sautée endives; undecided what I should accompany them with.

This time NEXT week I'll take stock of what's left and end up with a targeted shopping list to the tune of 'buy things to cook with the remaining veggie box things'.

Suggestions for endive preparation (nb: i like mashed potato but hate MAKING mashed potato, so endives-in-mash as per the dutch is a last resort... although i have a stack of roast potato and sweet potato leftovers right now from the roast...) welcome! Ditto things to do with a lot of kiwifruit...

Right now I'm going to make a roast beef sandwich. With onion jam.