Seasonal eating & Rhubarb chat

I continue to work towards seasonal eating as an all year round skill for my family.  A funny choice of word to call it a skill?  I think that's right though as it's something you learn to do in this day and age, when everything is available all of the time and it's almost an entitled feeling in society to have fresh strawberries in Winter.

Here on the smallholding, we aren't exempt from doing this and can buy blueberries in January and have banana pancakes that have travelled goodness knows how far on any day of the year.  Don’t get me wrong, we do eat seasonally (I’ll include using our home preserves out of season and the Winter Stores of veg in that) but we don’t have food growing 365 days of the year, which we could, given where we live in the North East of England.

After a few years of trial and error, with learning along the way, that’s my immediate goal which I am stepping up my actions to be able to achieve it.  Does that mean we won't eat bananas? No, but moving in to the remainder of 2023, I'll be aiming for the 80/20 rule in that 80% of our intake is local and seasonal.

In theory I could be harvesting much more from the garden now.  In 12 months and that sentence will be redundant ;) For now we are buying a weekly veg box from the local greengrocers which supports our local small business and more.  It's a beauty of a box.  I get the £25 one which is a bumper amount of fruit and veg.  Not everything in it is local, but that’s not an issue.  I’ve decided that although the box may be too much to get through every week, it will give us some things to preserve in small batches, if there’s a chance they won’t get used timely, which I am very pleased with.

So veg box aside, I’m starting my home grown seasonal eating mission off with the humble and potentially underrated Rhubarb.  There’s a wealth of recipes that are out there on the interweb, some traditional, some more ‘creative’ .  From now through until June I will be trialling many of them.  I'll post on here as well as my social media channels if you're interested.

A little bit about rhubarb then.  A rampant perennial and yes, it’s leaves are mildly toxic but perfect to compost (or use as a mulch to keep weeds down), it requires little attention once it’s got its roots down.  Don’t harvest during the first full year of growth but after that, harvest during the peak seasons by twisting the stalk at the base and pulling.  Don’t cut rhubarb stalks, twist them.  Cutting could encourage rot of the plant and make it ill.  Cutting it also leaves some of the stalk on the plant so it doesn’t know the stalk has gone and will not encourage new growth to replace what it has lost.

I plan on making the usual culprits, crumble (just has to be done), cordial / syrup as a drink, bottled as chopped fruit, poached or stewed and jarred for the winter, as a country wine, dehydrated, in pies, cobblers and muffins.  Not to forget as vinegar, in recipes like pavlova or shortcake and also as an apple sauce, where I'll puree it and interchange it with apple sauce on our roast dinners.  There's plenty more which I'm looking forward to doing.  Our rhubarb has grown rampant in previous years, so I'm hoping for the same this year!