• 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.

Fast food

Posted on March 12, 2008 by SallyGardener

Domestic goddess rating: 100% (speed queen tonight) Five-a-day: 5/5 Food miles: about 40

On the menu: Toast, jam and juice (breakfast); noodle soup (lunch); spring (greens) chicken and mash (supper)

I got in at 5.30pm this evening. We were sitting down to a tasty, seasonal supper at 6pm.

This was as much a surprise to me as to anyone. After all, this wasn’t just a pull-from-the-freezer job, or sausage and chips: this was proper cooking, fresh veg, fresh meat, lots of vitamins, healthy food.

I got the inspiration from the lovely veg box people at Abel & Cole. They have some fantastic recipes on their website, so I picked out one that used the veg I had in the rack this evening – spring greens – and after fiddling about and changing bits to suit me, I came up with the ultimate in fast food: spring (greens) chicken. Have a go and see if you can cook it faster than me (that’s less than 30 minutes from start to finish). At this rate I could be giving McDonalds a run for their money…

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

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