Pink food #2 (or should that be #3?) « The Year of Eating Seasonally

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.

Pink food #2 (or should that be #3?)

Posted on March 5, 2008 by SallyGardener

Domestic goddess rating: 100% (back to proper cooking now things have calmed down again) Five-a-day: 5/5 Food miles: about 40

On the menu: Toast, jam ‘n’ juice (breakfast); rather scrumptious beef and spring green stir fry my talented hubby just … well… made up (lunch); PSB pasta (supper)

Pink food again today! Entirely unintentionally, I have to say, as I didn’t realise that was going to happen. There I was cooking up a storm with the first PSB of the year and some white wine, when I noticed the wine had turned a distinctly rosy shade. The purple PSB had coloured it beautifully, and the resulting sauce, too.

I could make an entire pink meal here – braised cabbage, then the rather tasty PSB pasta I cooked this evening, and, let’s see, rhubarb fool for pudding? The princesses would be proud of me!

Filed under: Cooking, Recipes, Seasonal eating, healthy eating | Tagged: pasta, pink food, purple sprouting broccoli