The concept is simple: for a weekly subscription fee, you receive a bag full of organic, often locally grown, in-season fruits and vegetables. The catch is that you have to take what they give you. Depending on your perspective, this may not even be a catch - I enjoy the surprise of unpacking my bag as I start to dream up recipes.

If you aren't a "kitchen creative" type, no worries. Many services provide recipes, tailored to what shows up in your weekly delivery. (When in doubt, there is always Google.)

Some vegetables come in abundance - this summer has seen lots of lettuce, and last winter we were visited weekly by leeks - while others appear very sporadically. I had never prepared salsify until it appeared in my vegetable bag for two weeks in a row, and I was thrilled when last week's delivery included chard for the first time this year.

The prices are competitive with supermarket costs for organic fare, so the key is figuring out which packet suits you: fruits, vegetables or both, available through most services in small or large.

Sometimes I supplement with a couple of items from the store, but generally my €8 fruit-and-veggie bag gets me and my husband through most of the week. That would be the small mixed bag from Julienne (a project of bio farm Lochting-Dedrie Roeselare), which includes five types of vegetables and two kinds of fruit. Bigger packets offer both more types of produce as well as larger quantities of each.

This week's selection included tomatoes, leeks, a head of lettuce, a Chinese cabbage, a half a dozen plums and several apples. At a minimum, that's stir-fry, a salad and pie. Their weekly newsletter tells you the names of the farms where each item was grown, so you can give yourself two pats on the back: one for bolstering the local economy, and a second for eating healthy.

www.julienne.be
www.biodichtbijhuis.be (click on "verdelers")