This is our third week of Riverford Veg Boxes, and this week we got Jerusalem artichokes, an ugly looking veg, but I am looking forward to trying it out. My sister-in-law, Jane is coming to stay with us for a few days this week and I am hoping to have her help me out with some recipes, as she is a cook at a fancy 5* Hotel up in Northumberland. Overall the veg boxes have been a great success, I am eating far more veg than I used to and I feel so much better for it, my skin is clearing up and I feel like I have much more bounce and energy, oh and I lost a little weight too, so an added bonus!
Last week we got milk and eggs from Riverford for the first time, it purely as an experiment, and also because during the Bahá’í 19 day Fast, we were using more for our breakfast.
The eggs were nice and big and tasted very nice, very much unlike the bland almost tasteless eggs you get in the supermarket. They are not as cheap as getting them from the Grainger market, but these eggs are organic and carry the Vegetarian Societies Symbol so we know the chickens have a cruelty free life, are free range, and not pumped full of nasty hormones and drugs. So I think we will keep getting the eggs.
As for the milk, well we normally have our milk delivered by our local milkman, a rare thing in Britain I know. He used to get his milk from the Dairy Farmers of Britain, until they went bust and the Blaydon Dairy closed. After that I don’t know where the milk came from, but its not as good, and it goes off after a day or two. Plus the milkman as lovely a bloke as he is, always delivers it between 1am and 2am, when we are both asleep, so the milk stands on the doorstep for about 4 hours This is not a big problem in the winter but as the weather warms, it can sometimes result in the milk being off upon delivery.
So after trying the milk from Riverford, we have decided to stop getting milk from the milkman, I feel bad about it, but the cost of the milk from Riverford, is actually slightly cheaper and its organic. It also lasted much, much longer than the milkman’s milk. I am justifying it on the environmental side by reminding myself that instead of three trips a week to supply us with veg and milk, there will now be only one trip a week to supply us, cutting down some of our carbon footprint.
On another front, we got our dates through for myself and Lindsay to go on our Bahá’í pilgrimage to Haifa and Acre in Israel. We are off at the end of October next year, so we are both very much looking forward to that. As bonuses we get to transit via the worlds biggest bus station and use the world smallest subway system.
God Bless
Michael
