Monday, November 5, 2012

Eating Seasonally

Husband and I have always been very organised about planning menus and shopping accordingly. Our menus rarely - if ever - used seasonal veggies. We just buy what we need without thinking too much about it.

Our veggie harvest last summer caught us on the hop. We didn't expect such an abundant crop and found it hard to get out of our mindset of planning a menu and then buying the veggies. We did well once we got into it, however.

We're hoping this summer will be even bigger and better but we really need practise at planning a menu around existing veggies rather than planning first and then buying. To that end, last week I purchased our first seasonal veggie box from our on-line greengrocer. We didn't know what was going to be in it. It was sort of like Christmas/Chanukah opening the box and seeing what wonders were there. The box was full to brimming with veggies around which we planned this week's menu.

On Friday evening we had the mother of all stir fries. We ate off of that for three days. Then we had a traditional meat and roast veggie meal. (The kids had lentil patties.) Last night we had a vegetarian chilli which will feed us for a couple of days. We've discovered that mashed sweet potato added to chilli is a filling and tasty way to add extra bulk, vitamins and minerals so we did that. Tomorrow night we're having a potato, cauliflower and leek soup using the cauliflower growing in our garden.

First Froots sent us an iceberg lettuce which Teenage Son will eat. The rest of us prefer salad greens. I began to lament the fact that we didn't have enough greens left for our lunches today when Husband - who is working from home today - dashed out to the veggie patch and grabbed a handful for us to put in our salad. From garden to bowl in under five minutes.

Cheers.

1 comment:

  1. Shopping at the local market means I buy what's in season mostly - at least I know it is fresh and going to taste nice. Even better though from the garden......ours is not so good though now - although we had salad in winter at least and will have enough garlic now for several months. Despite a fab weekend we missed our normal market - picked up a few things at willunga (pricey but nice) and then had to do the bulk of the vege shop at a greengrocer on the way back yesterday.....ended up buying about 1/2 as much for nearly the same as I wd pay at the market and didn't buy stuff I normally would as it was pricey and looked gross.....hopefully will have time before the concert next Sunday to go again.

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