The Purple Sprouting Broccoli is back and I’m overjoyed it’ll be joining us in our veg boxes and kitchens regularly over the coming months. A beautiful and delicious winter treat, Purple Sprouting Broccoli offers leafy sanctuary in a winter sea of root veg. This is what it means to eat seasonally!

RECIPE!!

My hands down favourite PSB recipe is an unmeasured combination of the following fresh ingredients:

E.V Olive Oil, Salt, Pepper, Honey, Red Pepper (thinly sliced) and Purple Sprouting Broccoli (washed and broken into smallish pieces).

Get the oil hot in the pan and then add the honey. Straight away, add the PSB and Red Pepper and sear, until the pan gets quite dry. Lower the heat, season and cook off til soft. Serve with a pulse, or with bread or salad. In fact, serve with whatever you like – this veg and honey combo will make any mealtime awesome!

Most of the Purple Sprouting Broccoli we will buy for the Regather Veg Boxes is from the 200 acre Organic Farm in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, Organic Pantry. They keep 80 acres in veg production at any one time and focus mainly on Brassica Growing, with a 6 year crop rotation of 2 years brassica, one year fallow, 2 years white crop (grain), 1 year fallow. Organic Pantry is much bigger than any farm around Sheffield – It is 200 acres whereas, altogether, our city has under 20 acres of Certified Organic Land. The Regather Veg Box Scheme prioritises Sheffield Based Organic Farms, but we are lucky that there are larger Organic farms close enough to deliver into the city too.

At this moment in time, there is a much greater demand for local, Organic produce than there is supply in Sheffield. Happily, it is customer demand that creates change, and there are some amazing projects in Sheffield working to develop new food growing areas, train more people to have the skills to grow and I hope to blog in the coming weeks on the work Regather is doing to increase Sheffield’s Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture.

This week, the Regather Box Team decided to keep a more regular blog, and I am hopeful that we will share the aims, strategy and foundations of Regather co-operative as well as seasonal recipes, stories from the farmers and producers, upcoming events at Regather and in our wider community.

We’ve got an enthusiastic team of lovely people working at Regather and I hope to encourage lots of them to contribute to this blog – I’m envisaging :

Tim’s passion for Juices and Jazz,

Dan’s trike riding and beer brewing,

Doug’s enthusiasm for the humble potato and hatred of plastic,

Clem’s stories from a childhood on the farm,

Gareth’s vast knowledge on Co-operatives and Techno,

Charlotte and Helen’s work to increase Sheffield’s Urban Agriculture,

Our EVS team Giorgia, Sergiu and Kristin’s experiences as volunteers at Regather and more.

One more exciting step of progress to note this week is that we’ve just started to offer Oatly Organic Oat Milk, Oatly Barista Oat Milk and Provamel Red Organic Unsweetened Soya Milk. We felt it was important to offer a dairy free milk option in our box scheme, and then couldn’t decide between the three (and why should we!). I now have soya, oatmilk and cows milk in my fridge at home.

You can order any or all three to be delivered with your regular Regather veg box in the Shop, or email us at [email protected]

We’d also love to hear about other products / produce you’d like to order with your box so please get in touch with any suggestions 🙂

Wishing you a lovely week – Fran (and all of the Regather Team)