One of the best things about sourcing locally grown farm produce is that you’re guaranteed to get a variety of different items as the seasons change.  Pulling the first new season Discovery apples out of my fruit and veg bags a few weeks ago put such a smile on my face. This week’s enormous cabbage also made me laugh, partially because the basketball-sized monstrosity was even larger than my face.  Which of course left me facing an interesting question: what does one make with an excess amount of English cabbage?

It’s another installment of the Veg Bag game, where I explore new recipes to use up the array of organic fruits and vegetables that I pick up every week. Carrots and potatoes are a familiar arrival (which have gone into crispy pancakes and veggie fritters) but this week’s cabbage presented a new challenge.  I also received some lovely green beans about the length of my forearm - who says organic vegetables have to be smaller than conventional? With all these excellent British vegetables in hand, I had to go for an old-school British classic: bubble and squeak!

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One of my favorite parts of the week is picking up my Growing Communities veg bag from Hackney City Farm. As I’ve written before, a veg bag is the British equivalent of a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) box, filled with organic and mostly locally grown produce. Following a veggie burger as well as carrot potato pancakes, I’m doing more fun kitchen experiments figuring out how to use all the random vegetables that come my way.  It’s the veg bag game! Can’t beat anything that combines games and food: two of my favorite things on the planet besides panda babies.

Growing communities is nice enough to include a recipe in the bags each week, which I’ve found to be a great starting point for figuring out what to make. It’s amazing how many dishes can be made based on what can often be found in your average kitchen - today I debated a pasta primavera and a stir-fried eggplant with brown rice - but decided to riff off the Courgette and Cheese soup recipe from the bag.  The fun part of the game is playing with ingredients depending on what I’ve got lying around and seeing what deliciousness results. I didn’t have any cheese, but I did have cherry tomatoes and some verging-on-stale whole wheat bread so I tossed them both in for a texture similar to ribollita (a Tuscan soup made with stale bread).  The bread makes it hearty, but it’s got the lightness of a vegetarian as well as dairy-free soup. Depending on what you’ve got lying around, you can make any adjustments as well. Enjoy!

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However, I’ve been having a bit of trouble with the carrots as they’ve always been lower down on my list of favorite vegetables. Once the more perishable items like the spinach and tomatoes have been eaten in fresh salads, I find myself with a big bowl full of dirty carrots and potatoes. It’s like getting to the harder advanced levels of the How-To-Cook-Up-Your-Veg-Bag game and I need to challenge myself to solve the cooking puzzle. So I’ve written up two simple recipes that explore the wonderful world of carrots and potatoes: a Carrot Potato Pancake and Crispy Veggie Fritter that’s essentially a vegetarian meatball. Perhaps it should be called a veggieball. Regardless, both recipes are simple and tasty and a great way to use up any root vegetables you’ve got lying around. Enjoy!

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A lot of supermarket vegetarian burgers try so hard to resemble meat that they ignore the fact that vegetables actually taste delicious in the first place. Why try to replicate a beef burger with a monotonously colored brown thing full of mysterious ingredients and even weirder textures when you can eat a vegetable burger that actually showcases the flavors of the vegetables? Here on Eat.Drink.Better we’ve seen fantastic burgers made of black beans, white beans, lentils and portobello, and and even beets! Here’s another veggie burger that’s brightly colored, packed with exciting flavors, and simple to make with both fresh and canned vegetables. Plus, it’s healthy but still deliciously tasty thanks to the freshness of just-grated carrots and zucchini with the heft of canned chickpeas and the salty tanginess of halloumi cheese.

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I’ve always loved the idea of foraging for food, but the idea of dying from a poisonous mushroom overdose has always put me off from plucking edibles from the ground for dinner. Luckily, you can often find a carefully selected array of wild and exotic mushrooms at grocery stores or farmers markets. Sometimes, when there’s potential for serious injury, I find it’s best to leave things up to the professionals.

I found this gorgeous array of exotic mushrooms at the Sporeboys stall at London’s beautiful Broadway Market. Mushrooms are easy to cook, good for you, and have a deliciously rich, almost meaty taste that’s a great vegetarian substitute. I made a simple sautéed mushroom mix with olive oil, herbs, and cheese that tasted great on toast as well as pasta. It could also top a number of other dishes that you’ve already got in your kitchen. It’s simple, versatile, and oh so tasty…and no fear of poison! What more could you ask for?

Here’s an easy way to cook your mushrooms and a number of ways to serve them too:

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Until I started receiving local British vegetables through my organic veg box scheme, I had only ever purchased cauliflower as a large white vegetable swaddled in crinkly translucent plastic at the supermarket.  However, this week’s veg bag came with a huge green lump about the size and weight of a dodgeball. At first, I thought it was some sort of unknown English cabbage. However, upon peeling away a few of the thick, dusky green leaves, I discovered a tiny cauliflower the size of my fist nestled amongst the paler, thinner stalks.  I’ve never even seen so many cauliflower leaves before, much less a version of the vegetable that consisted of about 80% leaf and 20% flower.

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How do you like your eggs? The answer to that question used to be sunny side up, scrambled, or over easy. Now, it’s cage-free and organic, thank you very much.  Since I moved to London recently, I’ve noticed a greater level of public awareness regarding egg production and chicken welfare as compared to the United States.  Most supermarkets and chain restaurants, and even some giant multinational corporations, sell or use exclusively free-range eggs and prominently advertise doing so.

It’s certainly a big change from the United States, where cage-free eggs are generally available but are not as widespread in popularity as in the United Kingdom. It appears to be a slowly growing movement back at home, and it’s great news that some states have begun to pass laws improving living conditions for chickens. Unfortunately, we’ve still got a long way to go before reaching the level of public demand and corporate response for the right kind of eggs that can be found here in the UK.

Here are a few of the differences I’ve noticed with regard to egg production and marketing in the UK and the States.

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If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably found yourself in the situation of being ready to make dinner but then realizing you haven’t bought groceries in a while and there’s not much to eat in the kitchen. When you’re hungry but also too lazy to leave the house to go shopping, it’s time for some serious MacGyver action. But instead of defusing a dangerous bomb with just a paper clip and duct tape, the task is to create a tasty meal with the only tools in front of you: the contents of your fridge and pantry.

Thankfully, there are a few recipes that can nearly always be created at the last minute with just a few ingredients. One of my favorites is Spaghetti Aglio e Olio, which sounds complicated but is just a simple and delicious dish of pasta with olive oil and garlic. I’d venture a guess that most people usually have a box of dried pasta stashed somewhere in the kitchen and olive oil and garlic are generally pantry staples. Ta-da! You’ve got the makings of Spaghetti Aglio e Olio. If you happen to have any other fresh vegetables in the house, you can toss them in as well. It’s a great way to cook green by using up produce before it goes to waste and cooking a filling and tasty meal without any meat.

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I feel like I’ve finally settled a little here in London now that I am the proud recipient of an organic fruit and vegetable box scheme from a local company called Growing Communities. These box schemes are the equivalent of what we call Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) boxes in the States. As other writers have mentioned on Eat.Drink.Better, it’s a great way to support local farmers and have good produce around to eat!

I feel blessed to live in the same area as Growing Communities, because it means I get access to their boxes of local and organic fruits and veg (the nickname everyone gives to vegetables here). You have to live or work in the neighborhood of Hackney in order to be a part of the scheme, which I’ll explain below. Their box scheme is particularly cool for a couple of reasons:

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Grocery shopping can be complicated when you’re trying to make ethical choices. You’re faced with a lot of difficult questions: Is it better to buy the organically grown blueberries trucked across the country from California or the conventionally grown apples from a local farm in Western Massachusetts? In my case, the more vexing question is ‘Why did you freaking move away from the organic AND local food paradise of San Francisco in the first place? But I digress.

Organic, Conventional, or Local? Knowing Your Options

I’m visiting my parents in Boston and decided to make a fruit tart dessert for a family brunch.  I headed to Whole Foods, the closest grocery store with both organic and local produce options. No matter how you feel about the chain, it’s pretty cool that all their produce is helpfully labeled as ‘organic,’ ‘conventional,’ or ‘local,’ sometimes even with a profile on the farm of origin.  It makes it easier to know what you’re buying, but it can still leave you standing dazed amid the Chilean grapes and California clementines, paralyzed by the complexity of options in front of you.

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For those of us who love a crispy slice of bacon but also care about the impact of our food choices, eating meat can be a very complex issue.  Just for starters, there’s the environmental aspects of meat production, the safety concerns with industrial processing (read this frightening article in the NYTimes about ‘anthrax sausages’) and the thorny ethical questions of animal welfare to consider. It’s a difficult question: how can we have our steak and eat it too?

My current solution? Buy locally and sustainably raised meat from farmers markets. I went to the bustling Union Square Greenmarket in New York City last weekend to explore my meat purchasing options and do some research. And by ‘research,’ I mean ‘eating.’ Here are photos and some reasons why farmers markets are a great place to get your meat fix.

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