This week’s boxes again feature some less common varieties of common staples. We’re always excited to get some of Richmond Farm’s golden beetroot bunches – they look great, taste great, but on top of that the leaves are just as good to eat as the roots! Staying on the colour theme, $30 and $40 boxes receive a lucky dip of potatoes – either Red Foo or Sapphire potatoes, both from John, and as the names suggest, red or blue respectively. Sapphires are better for roasting and mashing, being a more floury type, but the foos are pretty versatile.
$40 boxes include shallots from Premium Fresh – onions’ sweeter cousin – and Scott Hansen has sent us the first lot of Winter Cole pears for the season, which are definitely my favourite, for their sweet, floral flavour. (Once again, it’s lucky dip – some boxes get Packhams, some Winter Coles.) And $20, $30 and $40 boxes include the forgotten parsley – old-fashioned curly parsley, once ubiquitous but now almost always ignored in favour of the flat, “Italian” variety (which for me is far more useful in Middle-Eastern dishes than in Italian ones…)