Seasonal, Local, Winter Foods

Wed, Feb 17, 2010

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Seasonal, Local, Winter Foods

Local food is usually associated with farmers’ markets, spring, summer and autumn. Winter is unfortunately forgotten thanks to snow, freezing cold and the complete lack of greenery. How can we possibly find local, fresh foods during these cold months other than to forgo the whole “local’ thing and have it imported from other parts of the world/country?

The Green Blog, over at Boston.com, reminds us that in fact we can get local and fresh during winter with foods such as sweet potatoes, kale, and winter squashes. With winter farmers’ markets popping up around Massachusetts, it makes it much easier for us to achieve a greener life style, by cutting down on our “carbon foot print” during the cold part of the year and not just when the sun is shining and the snow has melted.

There are quite a few foods that are in season during the winter months to look for in your local grocery store if you don’t have one of these winter farmers’ markets. If you are having a problem knowing how local the produce is, usually in small print is a label stating which country the product is from and sometimes even adding if it’s locally grown.

Here is a short list of veggies you can find more often locally grown during the winter months.

Bok Choy, brussel sprouts, and cabbage are best during late fall and winter, though cabbage is found year round.

Broccoli and cauliflower are both available year round, but are best during fall and winter.

For herbs try some Cilantro, it’s a cool weather herb whose season is from fall through to spring in warmer areas and spring and summer for cooler areas. Another couple of herbs that are available year round are thyme and mint.

Fruits aren’t usually around during the winter but clementines, grapefruits, kiwis, kumquats, mandarins, and lemons are all good to go around winter time.

There are many varieties of winter squash that is also readily available during fall and winter such as acorn squash, butternut squash, delicata squash, hubbard squash, heirloom and roasting pumpkins, spaghetti squash, basically squash with a hard, thick shell.

If you are looking for a list of locally grown foods for your region try Local Harvest for the US, Food Network Canada’s The 100 mile Challenge, the Good Food Channel’s Local Food Directory for the UK, and Organic Food Directory for Australia.

Photo by random duck.

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This post was written by:

Rochelle - who has written 324 posts on Made in Kitchen Blog.


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3 Responses to “Seasonal, Local, Winter Foods”

  1. Bonnie Says:

    good information. To bad when I went to the local harvest nearest to me Ifound the last update was June 2000. I called got voice mail and asked them to update the info.

  2. Rochelle Says:

    That’s terrible! Hopefully they will soon update their information once they realize how much people actually want to know about local food!

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