Organic, I know I know, it’s the new buzzword, like clean eating, vegan, flexitarian, sustainability, ethical eating, truly free range but to name a few. Sjoe enough! I promise this will not be another preach! I have actually started this blog for more selfish reasons. It is fair to say that I am obsessed with food, I dream, write, read and study food and thankfully after a 360-degree career change I have actually made this obsession my everyday job when I trained as chef in London. I can’t think of anything else I would rather be doing. When I still had a ‘grown up job’ I use to work, help raise two girls and still host Supper Clubs in our living room whilst obsessively cooking every day for my family. Ironically, as most will agree, starting your own business is ALL CONSUMING and I now have less time to cook than ever, although I cook every day, if that makes sense?

I was thinking on how I could break this news without sounding preachy? So here goes, Hi I’m Adre and I eat organic and seasonal whole foods from small producers who share my ethos for sustainability and ethics, whether it’s raising animals or farming and looking after our mother earths soil. There I said it, it’s out, won’t be mentioning again.

The funny thing is with the zero time I now landed myself in, ordering organic food is actually SO much easier and cheaper (okay here me out) than going to the shops. Maybe that’s motivation enough? I go online, choose my box, sometimes from more than one company (between R170/R190 a box) add some other goodies and have the boxes delivered or I could collect at very convenient collection points, and Tada, weekly shopping – done!

By avoiding the supermarkets, I don’t spend money on unnecessary food. Yes, of course I still have to make my way to the shops like everyone else, but the load feels much lighter and let’s face it, supermarkets are depressing at best.

So why have a blog about my shopping habits?

Here is the scenario, okay I have decided to go seasonal and I would like to avoid the supermarkets and therefore plastic (should have added this in the beginning after sustainability). I go to a fresh food market and see beautiful broccoli’s. I come home not sure why I bought 4 of them and now I am staring at the broccoli thinking, okay how am I going to cook this baby? But the broccoli is not the only veggie you got sucked into, you decided to expand your veggie repertoire with all sorts of funny looking veggies! Heaven knows, what on earth are you going to do with 4kg of beetroot?? Did I mention the other buzzword ‘zero waste’? The guilt of the sad looking beets a week later.  Next scenario, I convinced you to buy weekly organic boxes full of veggies & fruit, it arrived, yes it looks amazing but what in the world am I supposed to make with rainbow chard & fresh turmeric?

So this blog is about helping me (and hopefully you) with quick and easy recipes with in season veggies, a sort of quick reference of tried and tested recipes created by me to rustle up in the week and a few recipes for weekends when we have more time. Hopefully by doing this, I can start building some sort of recipe library for veggies. How many ways can you cook a Broccoli – well as you are about to find out, many!

PS: it is probably worth mentioning that although I love writing about food, I am probably not very good at it! So please excuse my grammar, spelling and tenses.

Adré