• In season now: May

    New this month: Asparagus! The food of gods... and carrots are back.

    Still in season from last month: cauliflower, chard, green cabbage, salad leaves, main-crop potatoes (from store), salad leaves, sea kale, spring greens, rhubarb

    Goodbye till next year to: Purple sprouting broccoli (sniff, sniff), leeks, stored parsnips, forced rhubarb

  • What I’m doing here

    This all started when I picked the first strawberries from my new allotment.

    I'd never been so enraptured or so excited by food. It was a shock to find that anything could taste so good.

    So what - I'd never had strawberries before?

    No - all the strawberries I'd had were shop-bought, like as not flown in from intensive growers in Spain or Chile, and eaten in winter when strawberries should be a distant summer memory.

    It revolutionised my thinking about the fresh food we eat every day. I started to wonder if you got the same amazing taste from all types of food grown and eaten in season. And then I decided to do something about it.

    The Year of Eating Seasonally is my little experiment to find out what it's really like not to have it all. The only fruit and veg I and my family are going to eat in 2008 will be what's growing in the ground at the time (or, in winter, what I can get out of store).

    I want to find out if the hungry gap is really as hungry as everyone says it is: whether you're really eating nothing but cabbage all winter; and whether you miss strawberries in December.

    Along the way I hope I'll save a few tons of carbon being released into the atmosphere on my behalf, as I won't be requiring those French beans flown from Chile, thanks very much. And I hope I'll be rediscovering what food can really taste like.

    If you have any comments, please feel free to post them anywhere you like - or you can email me at sallywhite@hotmail.com.

Here goes…

Posted on January 1, 2008 by SallyGardener

Domestic goddess rating: have been spoilt all day, so am domestic goddess-worshipper for now Five-a-day: about 3/5 (does marmalade count, I wonder?) Food miles: umm… hopeless cheat since someone else cooked for me today, so I’ve no idea… 

On the menu: Nothing, really

It’s New Year’s Day and the start of my year of eating with the seasons, but I’ve been cheating already. We went to some friends last night to see in the new year and had the most enormous meal which broke all the rules: pencil-thin French beans, broccoli and apricots in December. But – ha-ha! – they don’t count, as 2008 hadn’t begun yet. It’s kind of interesting – when you’ve made up your mind to eat with the seasons you realise how much it’s part of everyday life to expect summer all year round.

Anyway, it was the kind of food-fest where you roll away from the table groaning quietly to yourself. Result – didn’t feel like eating much today apart from a bowl of yummy soup made with in-season root veg by my friends. So I’ve been an accidental angel today: tomorrow may be another story…  

Filed under: Cooking, Seasonal eating | Tagged: , ,

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One Response

  1. Rach, on January 3rd, 2008 at 10:49 am Said:

    What a brilliant idea! Good luck with it, looking forward to seeing how you get on.

    Rach x
    (www.littlegreenpea.wordpress.com)

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