Shavua Tov!
First notices, please hang in there 🙂
delivery fee – despite rising costs of fuel and many vehicle expenses in recent years, our delivery fee has remained constant since the beginning !!! However, we must now raise it by a modest amount to cover the costs. Accordingly, as of January 2017, the delivery fee will rise by 8 ₪.
Share us – We love what we do and we want to expand it to more people. To some of you, we make a special delivery. We would like to have more clients in your area. We would love to deliver to your friends, neighbors, and community members. Do you like us? Come on! Help us. Please distribute us to people from your schools, kindergartens, facebook friends …etc. Thanks!!
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It seems to me that the world is divided into those who love the leafy vegetables and those who don’t really consider them to be food. With the arrival of Autumn and early winter, there are those who are very excited with their return and those who treat them as spices or garnish and not as "real” vegetables.
Once there were only parsley, lettuce and spinach … but now the variety of greens is expanding more and more.
All the Leafy greens are perhaps similar in that that they are all the same part of the plant. However, they come in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, textures and, most important, flavors. I really invite you to give them a chance and enjoy them!
As a grower for more than one family, the matter of leaves is not so simple. It is a bit similar to the love/hate attitude about coriander. Some people love them very much, waiting for them impatiently, for any kind and as much as possible and also tell me what they prepared with every leaf, even those that were connected to the “real vegetables", like the leaves of the colored organic carrots from last week.
On the other hand, there are those who ask me why they even received leaves attached to the "real vegetables" or as my son said, when he saw me loading our home refrigerator: "Who will eat all this grass?" (Did you think that I don’t encounter the same difficulties regarding food that you do?)
So a bit about leaves (although you could write lots and lots):
1. First, all of the leaves that you get, even those attached to the root (like beets, carrots, radishes) or attached to the thickened stem (like kohlrabi or fennel), or attached to flowers (like broccoli and cauliflower) can and should be eaten!!
2. In general, all the greens you get can be eaten fresh and raw. Some of them may be too hard or rough or bitter or spicy for your taste when eaten raw, so a brief cooking will make these more palatable.
3. There is no end to what you can do with them: saute, steam, fill pies, burekas, fill them with filling like legumes or grains, soups, juices, pancakes, Latkes, spreads …
4. In all recipes, the leafy greens are interchangeable. For example: chard will always be great in place of spinach. A Spinach recipe would be fine with broccoli. Kale Soup with cauliflower leaves would be great.
5. In summer, leaves are small and in winter they are wide and very green. They can be thick or thin depending on the overall weather.
6. As they are adored by us they are also loved by other tiny crawling creatures. It's not nice to see them in our boxes and we do our very best to find and remove them so as not to send them to you. But remember, these creatures know what is good, and their presence and traces prove to us that what we eat is indeed free of toxins. Because of the comfortable weather, the activities of these little ones is great in the garden. The holes, if not too many, I tend to leave. Usually the holes are made by caterpillars. Do you know the story "The Hungry Caterpillar"? This is a story about a caterpillar that eats and eats and eats… And really they do eat lots in relation to their size. Luckily after all this eating when they are full, they usually find a good place to build a cocoon in the ground and continue on their life cycle, so they are no longer in the leaves. We are happy to leave them here in the garden so this wonderful cycle will continue.
7. If you receive flowers with the leaves, eat them too! They are healthy!
Nutritional Values – greens are very good not only as a supplement to taste and palate but also for our health. They are all very nutritious and essential to health and strengthening , especially in these volatile days such as ours. They contain chlorophyll, carotenoids, nutritional fiber, folic acid and vitamin C and K; also minerals like iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus.
Remember how to store them ? You need to keep them dry, in a sealed bag or box, at the bottom of the refrigerator where it is coldest. If you receive wet leaves (despite the inconvenience, I hope it will happen a lot this year because it is a sign of RRRAAAIIINNN) or if you decided to wash them before placing them in the refrigerator, remember to dry them very well. It is also possible to wrap them in a towel or paper towels and only then put them into a bag. Correct conservation will give them even two weeks of freshness!
Have a good week, green, wet and healthy.
Yours, the garden staff and Maggie
Health!
I expect in our organic vegetable baskets (draft only):
New Zealand spinach
lettuce
Colored cherry tomatoes
Carrot in colors
Jerusalem artichoke
Yams
onions
Cucumbers
Fennel
Leeks
In the larger organic vegetable baskets, also:
pumpkin
lettuce
Kale
coriander
Organic fruit baskets;
Bananas
sweeties
Clementines
Oranges
In the larger organic fruit baskets, also:
Red Grapefruit
Carambola
