• 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.

And we’re into month 3…

Posted on March 1, 2008 by SallyGardener

Domestic goddess rating: 90% (parteeeeee….) Five-a-day: 2/5 (party food ain’t healthy) Food miles: none

On the menu: Toast,  marmalade & juice (breakfast); nibbly party things (lunch); free-range chicken & chickpea curry to slump exhausted in front of the telly with (supper)

We’ve been celebrating Princess the Elder’s birthday over the last couple of days or so (seems like it’s been going on forever) so our quota of healthy food has… well… dropped a little.

So, anyway, here we are in March already. I thought I might be flagging a bit by this stage, but in fact I’m more into this little experiment than ever.

March feels like the beginning of spring in the garden, but on the veg side it’s the start of a real drought in terms of what you can eat. The stores have nearly all run out, and only the very toughest of brassicas remain. The one saving grace is the wonderful joys of purple sprouting broccoli, or PSB as we affectionately know it, which comes into season this month. I think I’m about to discover every conceivable way of cooking it over the next few weeks. We’ll see if I’m still as enthusiastic about it by the end of April!

Filed under: Cooking, Grow your own, Seasonal eating, healthy eating | Tagged:

« »

Leave a Reply