Eating Seasonally

Apparently we’re all thinking about plants right now. Back to nature? Planning for the apocalypse? Both?

I don’t know about you, but the pandemic has left me feeling very much adrift in time. What day of the week is it? What month is it? How many months has it been since the last time I walked out of my office building? (Answer: six months as of next weekend, although there are murmurs that we might be going back sometime before December. Dunwanna.) How many years has 2020 lasted?

One thing that’s helped me reclaim a sense of time is really digging into seasonal eating – that is, eating what’s in season in my area (on the Great Lakes). My spouse and I have a smallish vegetable and herb garden, and we’ve been buying local more and more…(1) to help out our local farmers and small businesses during the pandemic, and (2) for environmental reasons, which got a boost due to (1).

In spring (May-June here), we ate a lot of arugula (rocket), our favourite salad green, peppery and crisp. We grew radishes and ate those, mostly with the arugula. We got introduced to garlic scapes – like green onions except for garlic. If you’re a garlic farmer, you have to cut them off so the garlic head will get nice and big, so you might as well sell them…

In early summer, there was basil (all links are to my Instagram) and mint, the beginning of the cherry tomatoes and green beans, and a few cucumbers – those were mostly a bust this year, but we did make some refrigerator pickles. (Basically a shortcut version of canning; they don’t last for years, just weeks, but there’s no fussing with boiling water either.) We discovered that we like pickled zucchini even better than pickled cucumber.

In late summer (August), there was a ton of cherry tomatoes. Our favourite way to eat them is to cut some in half and marinate for a couple of hours with fresh basil and garlic and olive oil – lovely on salad or pasta or pretty much anything. (Italian is probably our default cuisine.) So we ate a lot of that. Also my very favourite local fruit: peaches, which taste like summer sunlight.

We also discovered a local Israeli restaurant that has divine falafels, and went through a phase of Mediterranean eating and cooking: baba ghanoush (eggplant dip), tabbouleh (with quinoa because I can’t do bulgur), anything to do with tahini, Greek salad with the cherry tomatoes and oregano, shawarma (okay, we didn’t make that, just ordered it for delivery…repeatedly).

Now in early September at the beginning of fall, the basil has caught some sort of illness and died. The cherry tomatoes have finally slowed down but the Romas (smallish, sort of pear-shaped tomatoes) are taking off and the beefsteaks (full-size tomatoes) are starting. We also have a whole pile of extremely spicy jalapeños coming ripe. My spouse loves spicy food, so I made him deal with them, and he didn’t wear gloves and was in pain for a good 24 hours afterwards. Next time: definitely gloves!

So we’re making a lot of Greek salad (still) and Mexican food – quesadillas with homemade salsa and spicy relish, chili from absolute scratch, mojitos with fresh mint, tomatoes being roasted to freeze. The salsa was delicious after a few days in the fridge, and we need to make more of it. Still to do: tomato sauce and tomato jam. (As I mentioned, we don’t do canning – um, yet? – but we do have a freezer that gets plenty of use at this time of year!)

We’re lucky enough to have a long autumn here, so there’s still time to do a second planting of radishes if we get around to it, to be roasted along with carrots (didn’t grow any of those this year, although we have in the past…hot tip, it requires planting a LOT of carrot seeds to grow a few carrots).

In our latest grocery order, we got a spaghetti squash. I look at it and think of fall, crunchy leaves and glorious colours, crisp weather and long walks, jean jackets and scarves, tea and pumpkin pie.

And I’m anchored in time again.