Post-holiday comfort food #2

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.

Post-holiday comfort food #2

Posted on April 23, 2008 by SallyGardener

Domestic goddess rating: 100% (baking goddess despite frantic family day – ha!) Five-a-day: 5/5 Food miles: none

On the menu: toast, jam & juice (breakfast); chicken soup (lunch); spaghetti bolognese and salad (supper)

Back to life, back to reality… spag bol on the menu again as rushing around after the kids. When did they invent after-school clubs? And when did we suddenly think they had to go to one every single day? Actually we’ve been quite draconian compared to some parents by limiting it to two a week (it’s suffered mission creep even so – Princess the Younger is on three now, and Princess the Elder is waging a cunning campaign to up her quota with tales of athletics prowess, only slightly diverted by my lack of time to make the relevant phone calls).

Anyway, I baked myself happy this afternoon, with another armful of rhubarb from the allotment. I came across the recipe for rhubarb cake while wandering around Waitrose a while back, and was quite intrigued, never having heard of baking rhubarb before. Well – we had the result hot with creme fraiche for pud – lovely, light and spongy in the middle, with just the right amount of squidginess where the rhubarb meets the cake mix. And the combination of sweet sponge mixture and tart rhubarb is just amazing. I intend to sneak a slice cold later on, as I don’t think it’ll last the week. Mmmm-hmm.

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Filed under: Cooking, Grow your own, healthy eating, Recipes, Seasonal eating Tagged: | baking, cakes, holidays, rhubarb, school clubs