Dedicated locavores have been eating a lot of root vegetables over the last few months. Fortunately, with fresh cucumbers and heirloom tomatoes coming from Deep Root Organic Coop, the end is in sight.
While we wait for the rest of the local produce to sprout, blossom and ripen, we have a hearty mix of local root veggies and some creative new recipes for the Boston Organics Community to try.
This Puree of Sunchoke Soup is garnished with pickled watermelon radishes and country bread croutons. The combination is a delightful blend of smooth and crunchy, spicy and mild.
We also have a recipe for Roasted Beets with Orange and Thyme that features organic beets from Red Fire Farm and fresh cut thyme from Happy Valley Organics.
And if you’re starting to feel like you’re in a bit of a “food rut,” here are a few simple ideas to help you discover new flavors in the kitchen.
This Week’s Local Produce
All of the fruits and vegetables we deliver are grown without synthetic pesticides and are USDA certified organic. Interested in receiving produce that’s both organic and locally sourced all year round? Check out our Local Dogma Box.
Similar to a CSA or farm share, our Local Dogma Box is filled with the best organic produce from local and regional farms and brought right to your door each week. It’s the easiest way to eat like a locavore!
The geothermal greenhouses at L’Abri Vegetal were running vigorously all winter long and it paid off with an abundant early spring harvest of organic tomatoes and cucumbers.
L’Abri Vegetal has been a pioneer in organic greenhouse growing for more than 20 years, and as a member of the Deep Root Organic Coop, they share resources and information with a collection of other small, organic farms in northern Vermont and southern Quebec.
This recipe for Potatoes and Celeriac Au Gratin makes use of the diverse collection of local spring produce in this week’s boxes. Dogma Box customers can use potatoes from Maine and celeriac from Red Fire Farm in central Massachusetts.
The homemade tomato-basil sauce that’s included in the recipe highlights the wonderful flavors of fresh basil from Happy Valley Organics and the previously mentioned slicing tomatoes from Deep Root Organic Coop.
If you want to use even more local ingredients, you can even substitute in some of Kimball Brook Farm’s organic half-and-half and Neighborly Farm’s Monterey Jack—both available in the dairy section of our add-on page.
This Week’s Local Produce
All of the fruits and vegetables we deliver are grown without synthetic pesticides and are USDA certified organic. Interested in receiving produce that’s both organic and locally sourced all year round? Check out our Local Dogma Box.
Similar to a CSA or farm share, our Local Dogma Box is filled with the best organic produce from local and regional farms and brought right to your door each week. It’s the easiest way to eat like a locavore!
It’s impossible to miss the plump organic tomatoes in this week’s Dogma Boxes because they’re the first locally grown tomatoes we’ve seen in a very long time.
It’s still way too early in the season to get our hands on any local field grown tomatoes, but these beauties come to us by way of Deep Root Organic Coop’s geothermally heated greenhouses.
One of Deep Root’s member farms grows a mix of juicy red tomatoes and “pink rose” tomatoes, which are slightly paler but full of vibrant tomato-y flavors that will have you itching for summer.
The weather’s warming up, but with a few April showers in the forecast this week it still feels a lot like soup season.
This week’s recipe for Carrot-Parsnip Soup with Sunchoke Chips combines a few of the winter’s finest root vegetables in one delicious blend. Winter Moon Farm intentionally left a few rows of parsnips in the ground over the winter and the lengthy frost has made these spring-dug parsnips particularly sweet!
This soup can be made entirely out of locally sourced organic vegetables and the addition of lightly fried sunchoke chips adds both a complementary crunch and a rich, umami flavor.
This Week’s Local Produce
All of the fruits and vegetables we deliver are grown without synthetic pesticides and are USDA certified organic. Interested in receiving produce that’s both organic and locally sourced all year round? Check out our Local Dogma Box.
Similar to a CSA or farm share, our Local Dogma Box is filled with the best organic produce from local and regional farms and brought right to your door each week. It’s the easiest way to eat like a locavore!
Spring is the season of seedlings, baby bunnies and all things new. Quite suitably, our local farm partners are harvesting lots of crisp, young vegetables for us this week.
Dogma Box customers will be introduced to Lebanese cucumbers, one of the most adorable spring vegetables. These tiny cucumbers are a special variety that is meant to be harvested at a young age.
They have very few seeds and edible skins that don’t need to be peeled at all. This makes them ideal for tossing into a simple salad or for making quick pickles!
Grown by one of Deep Root Organic Coop’s member farms, L’Abri Vegetal, these mini cukes were grown in a greenhouse heated with geothermal power. Though the farm is located across the border in southern Quebec, it’s actually about as far away from us as Bangor, ME.
The Lebanese cucumbers are joined by freshly harvested organic alfalfa sprouts from Jonathan’s Sprouts in Rochester, MA. One serving of sprouts contains 3 grams of protein and a whole bunch of essential vitamins and minerals!
This Smooth and Crunchy Sandwich probably looks familiar to vegans who commonly rely on the natural proteins in chickpeas and whole grain breads to maintain a balanced diet.
Perfected by the acclaimed New York chef and restauranteur, Marcus Samuelsson, this sandwich will gratify any veggie loving omnivore with its perfect blend of flavors and textures.
The sliced avocado can be omitted by committed locavores, but we find that it adds an important element to the sandwich’s overall composition. Those wanting to keep it really close to home can make their own hummus with the Boston Organics Hummus Meal Kit.
This Week’s Local Produce
All of the fruits and vegetables we deliver are grown without synthetic pesticides and are USDA certified organic. Interested in receiving produce that’s both organic and locally sourced all year round? Check out our Local Dogma Box.
Similar to a CSA or farm share, our Local Dogma Box is filled with the best organic produce from local and regional farms and brought right to your door each week. It’s the easiest way to eat like a locavore!
Much like pondering a glass containing equal parts water and air, the way you look at a black radish demonstrates whether you’re a pessimist or an optimist.
For pessimistic locavores, a black radish symbolizes the depths of winter; the soft and hard rind squashes have all been eaten, the local winter greens have been buried beneath several feet of snow and the supply of more colorful storage crops are running low.
But the optimist locavore looks beneath the black radish’s thick skin and recognizes the sweet and spicy flesh just beneath the surface.
The optimist might consider this portentous root to be the very first sign of spring because wherever a black radishes appears, the first spring-dug parsnips and local asparagus harvest are soon to follow.
These hardy radishes have made it through the winter and so have you! Optimists can celebrate this accomplishment with Black Radish Chips or a Black Radish and Potato Salad.
And this Black Radish and Blood Orange Salad is so tasty that you might just convince those pessimists that the glass is half full after all.
This Week’s Local Produce
All of the fruits and vegetables we deliver are grown without synthetic pesticides and are USDA certified organic. Interested in receiving produce that’s both organic and locally sourced all year round? Check out our Local Dogma Box.
Similar to a CSA or farm share, our Local Dogma Box is filled with the best organic produce from local and regional farms and brought right to your door each week. It’s the easiest way to eat like a locavore!
The weather’s warming up and while spring is still several weeks away, we’re getting a sneak peek this week thanks to the sustainable greenhouses at Happy Valley Organics and Deep Root Organic Coop.
Crunchy English cucumbers are making their way down from Deep Root Organic Coop’s headquarters in Vermont. The coop is made of about 15 farms in Vermont and southeastern Quebec, including one with a greenhouse that runs through the winter using geothermal heat.
Meanwhile, Doug Coldwell is bringing us bunches of fresh, organic basil from Happy Valley Organics. This fragrant herb used to only be available in the summer, but Doug uses his solar-powered greenhouses in central Massachusetts to grow basil even when the ground is frozen solid.
English cucumbers are a long, skinny cucumber variety particularly suited for greenhouse growing. They also happen to have thin skins and very few seeds, making them ideal for salads and mixed drinks.
One of our favorite summer cocktails, Cucumber Basil Mojito, just happens to highlight a few of the local organic items in this week’s boxes.
Fill your mason jars with a handful of organic basil and kick back with a refreshing blend of local ingredients while we wait for summer to arrive.
This Week’s Local Produce
All of the fruits and vegetables we deliver are grown without synthetic pesticides and are USDA certified organic. Interested in receiving produce that’s both organic and locally sourced all year round? Check out our Local Dogma Box.
Similar to a CSA or farm share, our Local Dogma Box is filled with the best organic produce from local and regional farms and brought right to your door each week. It’s the easiest way to eat like a locavore!
March is one of the most difficult months for Massachusetts locavores to find fresh organic fruits and vegetables. While California may already be showing early signs of spring, New England is still in the depths of winter.
Even the most prepared homesteaders are scrounging through the back shelves of their pantries to find the items they stored at the end of the last local season.
Fortunately, because Boston Organics works with a network of organic farmers, we’re able to continue to fill our boxes with a smattering of local produce by getting the best items from each farm.
This week, we have a profusion of organic root veggies like parsnips, potatoes and rutabagas. We also have a medley of fresh organic herbs from central Massachusetts!
Polenta is one of the coziest dishes you can make in the wintertime.
Braised root vegetables provide an excellent topping for this baked polenta, with its deliciously crusty edges and gooey, cheesy center.
Slowly cooking your parsnips, carrots and kohlrabi helps draw out these roots’ natural sweetness and creates a buttery melt-in-your-mouth texture that will have everyone asking for seconds.
This Week’s Local Produce
Potatoes
Picadilly Farm
(Winchester, NH)
Rutabagas
All of the fruits and vegetables we deliver are grown without synthetic pesticides and are USDA certified organic. Interested in receiving produce that’s both organic and locally sourced all year round? Check out our Local Dogma Box.
Similar to a CSA or farm share, our Local Dogma Box is filled with the best organic produce from local and regional farms and brought right to your door each week. It’s the easiest way to eat like a locavore!
The organic shallots in this week’s Dogma Box come from Emylou Farm, a family-owned organic farm that’s been a member of the Deep Root Organic Coop for several years.
Though shallots look kind of like oversized garlic cloves, they are actually more similar to a white or yellow onion. While you can use an onion in place of a shallot, if a recipe calls specifically for a shallot, it’s for a good reason.
Shallots are generally sweeter than onions and pack a lot of flavor in a small space without the acidic bite of a fresh onion. They also have a slightly softer texture, which allows them to incorporate more smoothly into soups and sauces.
One of our favorite things to do with organic kohlrabi in the winter is to shred it into a crunchy slaw. We especially love this recipe for Purple Slaw, and we’re in luck because Red Fire Farm is bringing us a few heads of red cabbage and big bulbs of purple kohlrabi this week!
A food processor or mandoline makes this recipe extremely easy to make, but it’s also entirely possible to shred the vegetables by hand. This Purple Slaw goes great with burgers and sandwiches, but you can also use it in salads, spring rolls and tacos.
This Week’s Local Produce
Potatoes
Picadilly Farm
(Winchester, NH)
Rutabagas
All of the fruits and vegetables we deliver are grown without synthetic pesticides and are USDA certified organic. Interested in receiving produce that’s both organic and locally sourced all year round? Check out our Local Dogma Box.
Similar to a CSA or farm share, our Local Dogma Box is filled with the best organic produce from local and regional farms and brought right to your door each week. It’s the easiest way to eat like a locavore!
The snow keeps falling, but the organic veggies keep coming from our network of local growers throughout New England.
This week’s collection of sweet root vegetables from Winter Moon Farm and Deep Root Organic Coop are complemented by the addition of crisp cabbage and crunchy Empire apples.
We also have fragrant basil from Happy Valley Organics! Grown in a solar-powered greenhouse, these fresh herbs are a welcome winter treat from central Massachusetts.
Making homemade pizza is a tasty and fun way to spend a Boston snow day. Grab a pound our new organic pizza dough and put your local organic veggies to work in this recipe for Cabbage and Sunchoke Pizzas.
If you’re looking for a simpler way to use you local organic ingredients, you can create a classic Margherita Pizza with a handful of fresh-cut basil from Happy Valley Organics and Appalachian Naturals Organic Tomato Puree!
This Week’s Local Produce
Potatoes
Spaghetti Squash
Picadilly Farm
(Winchester, NH)
Sweet Potatoes
Cabbage Celeriac Kohlrabi
Sunchokes
All of the fruits and vegetables we deliver are grown without synthetic pesticides and are USDA certified organic. Interested in receiving produce that’s both organic and locally sourced all year round? Check out our Local Dogma Box.
Similar to a CSA or farm share, our Local Dogma Box is filled with the best organic produce from local and regional farms and brought right to your door each week. It’s the easiest way to eat like a locavore!
Deep Root Organic is a cooperative of about 20 farms throughout northern Vermont and southern Quebec. As their name suggests, they are known for growing some of the finest organic root vegetables in New England.
This week, Deep Root is bringing us organic parsnips, rutabagas and turnips. Each one has its own distinct flavor and texture, but all three are delicious in soups or simply roasted with some olive oil, salt and herbs.
This recipe for Rutabaga with Caramelized Onions and Apples is all about using naturally sweet ingredients and taking them to the next level.
The trick is cooking everything slowly on a low heat to draw out the flavor. But adding a little extra brown sugar to the mix doesn’t hurt either!
This Week’s Local Produce
Red Beets Golden Carrots
Radish Medley
All of the fruits and vegetables we deliver are grown without synthetic pesticides and are USDA certified organic. Interested in receiving produce that’s both organic and locally sourced all year round? Check out our Local Dogma Box.
Similar to a CSA or farm share, our Local Dogma Box is filled with the best organic produce from local and regional farms and brought right to your door each week. It’s the easiest way to eat like a locavore!