That photo is corn fritters drizzled with maple syrup. We just started frying them up for a 2pm special – and they’re an element of our Maple Meal Box. If you head away from the city this time of year, you’ll see signs for sugar shacks, where maple sap gets boiled down into syrup and little restaurants pop up to serve pancakes, corn fritters, cider donuts, and dill pickles (to cut through the sweetness of the fresh syrup).

You’ve been asking! And finally we can announce: sunchokes are here, starting tomorrow, 3/1. Thanks to Pete’s Greens in VT for getting us local sunchokes. At breakfast we’ll be making The Sunchoke Truffle: fluffy house-baked pita, creamy truffled butter, caramelized onions, a 6.5 minute egg, and thin, crispy sunchoke slices. At lunch and dinner: The Sunchoke Mushroom: scallion-black-pepper mayo, fresh arugula, roasted crimini mushrooms, fried brined onions, and roasted sunchokes. But what IS a sunchoke?

Oh no – 2 of our favorite items are leaving the menu on Wednesday! Stop by today and tomorrow to get your last Bridgewater (lunch/dinner) and Carrot Lox (breakfast). These were both blockbuster items but the good news is they’re leaving to make room for a very special ingredient that only comes into season in ~deep winter.~ Any guesses what that could be? It starts with the letter S…

Join us this Friday for pizza (and excitement) at the HUB! If you’ve been reading for a while, you know Enzo. He worked at Clover for 9 years and is responsible for some of our best innovations (like the Japanese Sweet Potato Sandwich, or the thing we do with ninth-pans to hold up our fry timers). Enzo has always been really passionate about pizza. For the past few years he’s been working on a new kind of dough. It’s sort of foccaccia, sort of Sicilian, baked in a deep Lloyd pan.

Remember when Pushpir came into the kitchen at CloverHSQ and schooled Ayr on Northern Indian cooking? That was 2013. A different CloverHSQ than the one you visit today. But I still remember the smell of the cilantro, mint, jalapeños, and orange juice in the blender. We hadn’t smelled that exact combo before. It was so cool to see one of my culinary heroes in our kitchen.

Have you had the Medlar Sandwich yet? The star of the sandwich is a jam we make from medlars. A medlar is a fruit that grows on a tree and comes into season in the winter. You can’t eat medlars right from the tree – they have to be fermented (or “bletted” – definitely in the running for worst word ever!) in order to become delicious. We undertake that deliciousness-process at the HUB in East Cambridge. But this year there was a little mishap…

The Pizza Friday Box gave us an idea: calzones! Ayr has been making these at his house and texting us photos. They’re big and saucy and so good. Basically a stuffed pizza/turnover situation with origins in 17th century Naples.

Thanks all who joined for the first public food dev meeting after Covid. Phil did a great job pulling it all together. If you’re a customer, farmer, vendor (or Clover staff member) reading this, you are invited to Food Dev! These happen Thursday afternoons at the HUB and they’re where all new food ideas are born. Just make sure to sign up – spots are limited.

House-made carrot lox, hearty vegetable stews with bread and pickles, Tunisian breakfast bowls, a pizza party kit, and a dream of snow, all in one box. Our Snowed In Box is back. This was Greg’s idea back in 2020. He thought it would be cool to make a box that was equally whether eaten after snowboarding or cozied up on the couch watching a movie.

We’ve been getting a lot of requests for the ability to gift a friend Clover Meal Boxes. After a lot of late night tech sessions, we have a way to do this! Yay! I’ve been looking and seeing a few of you have started to discover this feature and are starting to gift away. So cool to see.

If you’re a weekly meal box subscriber, you may have noticed way fewer plastic containers in your deliveries recently.When we started the program, we were in the pandemic, new to this whole home delivery thing, and a big concern was making sure that nothing spilled inside the boxes. So we relied on post-consumer recycled containers (aka plastic deli containers) for a lot of the items.