Friday 5 February 2010

Friday is our Day of Plenty

Almost one year ago, I wrote a blog post about our then fairly new grocery box subscription. Now it is winter again, we still have the grocery box, and we are still totally happy with it. The box has changed our grocery shopping habits, changed our eating habits and our cooking habits.
It also makes me think of Friday as the Day of Plenty, because that is when the new box arrives, filled with fresh organic fruits (from all over the world) and vegetables (from our region only) - food that will see us over the next week. I hand the empty box from the last delivery back and get a full one; I carry that into the kitchen and place everything on the counter, and then I take a moment to step back, look at all the food and feel very rich and very, very lucky.

And because we get only regional vegetables, I feel as if I now have a better connection to the area I live in. There is a lot of farming going on right outside the urban sprawls here, and a grocery box subscription means support for the organic farms in the area, less grocery shopping and dragging bags home for us, less carbon-dioxide and fresher produce due to very short transport, and jobs for the totally wonderful, nice and enthusiastic people who run the subscription service - it's a winners-only situation. (By the way, this winter, there's less cabbage and beetroot, but more black salsify and red kuri squash. I had never cooked either of those before this winter.)

There was a coconut in last week's box, too. It had been ages since I last had eaten a fresh one - when I was a child, I remember that my parents had sometimes bought one, gotten it open, and then there was a little coconut water in there that everyone could try with a small sip. I remember that, when buying the nut, the aim was to find the one nut with the most water in - and despite our careful selection, there was never more liquid in it than perhaps a very small glass about half-full.
Last week's coconut from the box? It was almost half full with the water. Lots. And it was sweet, delicious water - just like the nut itself was sweet and delicious.

Need I say that we have been eating very well this last year?

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