Root cellars and fruit sellers: thoughts on fruit and veg through the seasons

Ha! I like that title. In the spirit of today's topic, which has to do with the changing of the seasons, the random photo for today will actually be 2 exciting photos from yesterday:


It was sunny! We celebrated by going for a run, then spending the rest of the day inside having brunch (or, as Danny called it, "Not brunch...breakfast AND lunch" and going to the national gallery. oops. But then when we got out of the gallery we were greeting by another surprise: it was still light out! This is around 5:10pm, and we were pretty excited. Okay, we still have a long way to go, but it's about the baby steps.

Okay, on to the meat of today's post, which is fruit and vegetables. When we first got to London, Danny posted the following picture of our weekly farmer's market haul on Facebook with the caption "The bounty of the English summer." Our friend snarkily replied "soon you'll have the discontent of the English winter." Nice. But the joke's on him, because I'm finding the English winter to be quite pleasing so far, particularly the farmers market!





When I heard that our farmers market was year round I was excited, but fairly certain that by winter the color of our purchases would be almost entirely brown - potatoes, turnips, bread and dairy products. But as you can easily see, there are many green and other colored things available in the winter! And it's not so much that foods have disappeared as much as they've been replaced. Blueberries and cherries and strawberries have been replaced by apples and funny-shaped pears. Zucchini, broccoli, cucumbers and peppers are long gone, but oodles of brussels sprouts and a half-dozen types of cabbage have taken their place. Tender lettuces and bok choi are gone, but kale and sprout tops are here to stay (though there is one vendor there still selling salad greens, which they grow in their 5 acres of greenhouses!). And of course there are the piles and piles of things that grow underground and keep very well in a root cellar: carrots, potatoes, parsnips, beets, turnips, celeriac, swede, etc. And luckily, bread, cheese and eggs are always in season! Interestingly, winter squash season seems to have already come and gone. Sad.

With these new winter vegetables have come some well-timed cabbage and root vegetable recipes from the New York Times. We've made four of them in the past few weeks, and the last one I'm planning on making this week. They are:

Braised Cabbage (really good over couscous)
Bess Feigenbaum’s Cabbage Soup (I trusted a woman with the name Feigenbaum to make a good cabbage soup. And it was amazing! The first time I used savoy cabbage, and this week we're making it again with red cabbage)
Winter Root Vegetables over Polenta (yummy, but not earthshattering. I like polenta better when make with 1/2 water and 1/2 milk)
Spicy Braised Sweet Potatoes (make sure not to overcrowd the pan - ours took forever to cook!)
Soba Noodles in Broth with Sweet Potato, Cabbage and Spinach (making this week!)


While we're talking about vegetables (when aren't I talking about vegetables?), I just want to give a shout-out to all of the American fruits and vegetables that I've missed since being here. Of course, the produce market is global, but as we've mostly been trying to buy things from the farmers markets, there are some things we've either given up or haven't had much of. The things I've missed are: corn on the cob, mackintosh apples, peaches, Japanese eggplant, collard greens, sweet potatoes (yeah, we cheated on this one and bought some at the grocery store), heirloom tomatoes. Hmm...I guess that's it. But overall, this farmers market has many things that theone in Brookline didn't, so overall I'm very pleased. If you couldn't tell.

Next time - another recipe for apple cake!