Domestic goddess rating: 50% (taking it a bit easy but good supper tonight) Five-a-day: 3/5 Food miles: about 40
On the menu: Muesli & juice (breakfast); cheese, crackers & pate (lunch); leek and mushroom risotto (supper)
Mushrooms are a tricky one. Theoretically, I shouldn’t be eating them at any time other than in the autumn – say, September and October. But these are one of the few veg that are factory-farmed: produced, intensively, all year round in big sheds without much variation on needs or seasonality. It seems to be “wild” mushrooms – that is, oysters, shiitake, and ceps which have an actual season, and in fact everyone gets so excited about them in autumn that it’s one of the few seasonal foods we all know about.
Common-or-garden button mushrooms, though, are different. I quote from the wonderful Riverford organic veg box scheme’s website:
“Here in Britain, 98% of all mushrooms grown and sold are the common cultivated mushroom, Agaricus bisporus.” It goes on to say: “In their natural environment mushrooms are in season in the autumn. Commercial production in carefully controlled growing rooms allows mushrooms to be cultivated all year round.”
I treat, for example, chicken and beef as all-year-round foods (unlike, say, lamb – which is mature at the end of the year and should be bought then). It seems that here we have an all-year-round vegetable, too. I’m not sure whether commercial production of mushrooms is particularly environmentally friendly or not: do they heat these sheds, for example? But that’s one for a bit of extra research. Until then – it’s mushrooms with everything.
Filed under: Cooking, Seasonal eating | Tagged: haddock, mushrooms, year-round foods
