organic fruit & veg boxes.. how do you cope with the 'randomness'

[herladyship]

we used to have a box of fruit & veg delivered by a local organic farm, i gave up when i started working full time as i found it easier to plan meals in advance and it was hard to do that when i didn't know what would be coming in the box for that week!

under pressure from dh, i am going to give the box delivery scheme another try.. does anyone else struggle with meal planning? and any tips for coping with the 'unknown' element, particuarly relating to the veg in the box?

(we are a family of 4, dh & dd (8) are veggies & ds (14) & i eat meat)..

thanks in advance

maybe do the meal planning on the day the box arrives and start the planned week from that day, so you know what you have already iyswim

We've had a veg box for years, and weekday meals tend to be planned as far as carbohydrate is concerned - eg pasta + gloop, rice + curry, soup etc. Then you just make the appropriate gloop with whatever you've got. Helpful to have things like lentils, tinned toms and chickpeas in the store cupboard though. We can get these with our veg box as well.

Check out your potential box suppliers websites and see how much info they offer. They may list what's in season which will give you a head start.

With ours we can see when we order what is going to be in the box. If it's got quite a bit we know we won;t use I don't order the box but but individual items instead

riverford have a list of what is going to be in there on the website. totally recommend them.

Try to see what's in the box, as ours is delivered on a Friday we get a week's notice.

If you always have in your weekly menu a stir fry,a curry, a soup, meat-and-two veg meals and a casserole, you should be able to accommodate anything. Except beetroot. Ideas?

Also have store cupboard essentials so if for example a cauliflower or butternut squash appears you can use it in a recipe.

Recommend Keith Abel's "Cooking outside the box" which has suggestions for substituting and coping with oversupply/leftovers.

is it a really really local one, which doesn't have the fancy extras like letting you know what's in the box? I do sympathise but maybe it would be worth contacting them to see if they could start letting people know - it does make a difference. Try the Riverford recipes (on their website) even if you are not booking through them - I really liked all the recipes of theirs that I did.

Have some forgiving dishes up your sleeve - the word Stew covers virtually anything. I did find it very handy to have plenty of bacon in the fridge as this will overpower veg you are not sure of, and will kick up the flavour of April OMG-carrots-again stews really well. Many box veg make great chips/wedges - try jerusalem artichoke wedges, they are amazing! Also you don't have to use things all at once (obvious I know) - just bung a bit of swede into your dinner once a day rather than trying to make a stew with an entire swede.

Roast beetroot is very nice. In fact roast most winter vegetables is good. We don't have a veg box but we eat from our garden and it gets a bit interesting (not) from now on up til mid May or so.

Ours arrives on thursday morning and we do our supermarket shop on friday so it can complement it.

Also we can guess to some extent that there'll be stuff for making casserole, stuff for soup, something to roast and probably lots of cabbage and other 'side' veg etc. and we just have make sure we have good stock, meat, risotto rice etc.

Beetroot is great in soups too. I have also been known to put it in shepherd's pie (pink pie) and casseroles/stews - just like carrots.