Foods in season in June – Food For Kids Podcast episode 2

Joanne Roach (00:00)

In today's Food for Kids, we find out which fruits and vegetables are in season in June and how to help your child explore them.

Joanne Roach (00:20)

Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies.

It's the start of June now, so as usual, here's our monthly rundown of what seasonal foods to buy in June and help your kids to explore. I give you these lists each month so you can hopefully save a bit of money, help the planet out a little bit by buying foods that are working more with nature, And maybe expand the variety of foods that your family eats a little. It's also fun to explore food with kids when they're in season because they generally taste their best so they're more likely to enjoy them.

June is the month where everything starts to take off. It's been 10 or more weeks since the soil started to warm up enough for seeds to germinate in the ground and for flowers to be open and pollinated for fruit. So we're starting to have a much wider choice of fresh new foods to eat. So let's start with the foods that are grown in the UK right now.

So the first and most obvious group of foods when you think about June and Wimbledon and summer fates and so on is berries and currants. So for blueberries, strawberries, gooseberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants and raspberries, June really is the first month that you can get UK grown berries that haven't used tons of heat and lighting greenhouses to grow and that really taste like proper juicy berries.

Strawberries really are starting to be gorgeous now and you might be able to have a fun trip to a pick your own farm this month if there's one nearby. If not, then look out for some more locally grown strawberries in the shops. If your child isn't keen on them, trying them in season when they're super juicy really can make a big difference. If they don't want to eat them, they can build their familiarity by helping to hull them for other people, that is to take the leaves off and any tough white stem parts. If they don't like them raw, then you can also try cooking a few down in a pan and straining them through a sieve to add on top of vanilla ice cream as a sauce. Add a little sugar if they're a bit sharp but very ripe ones won't need it.

Currants like black currants, red currants and white currants are ripening like mad now and you might be able to find some locally. If you can get more than one type then it's fun for kids to explore them by comparing. Warn them that their taste is quite sharp and not very sweet and so they're not expected to love the taste. They usually go alongside something sweet like in a black currant cordial or red currants on top of a vanilla cheesecake. Or they go with something rich like a fatty or strong flavoured meat. And the acidity is there to cut through the strong flavour. Letting them know this means that they'll know it's an unusual taste and that they're trying it just for curiosity and adventure. They're not expected to like it or to want to eat more. However, if you can get hold of a decent sized punnet of blackcurrant, you could make a bottle of cordial together. It's basically just blackcurrants simmered in a little water, strained and added to sugar and a splash of lemon juice. They can see how it compares to their favourite shop brand. I'll leave a link in the show notes to a recipe that we use in our house.

Blueberries get a lot of good press as a sort of superfood and they do have a lot going for them because their blue colour is a bit rarer in food than some other colours. And with that purple or blue colour comes an antioxidant called anthocyanin. Antioxidants are those compounds which help your body to repair damage to cells, so we want to try and get a good range of different ones in our diet to do different repair jobs, and those are usually associated with different colours in foods. But although we do get anthocyanins from blueberries, there is also a lot of anthocyanin in blackberries in the autumn, in blackcurrants, cherries, raspberries and red grapes. So your child isn't keen on blueberries, not to worry. Just keep offering them periodically to build their familiarity, but find one of those other fruits instead that they do like. Nature generally does have more than one way to get something into your diet.

Cherries are ripening up now, but their season is quite short, so if your family likes them, now is the time to grab some big punnets while they're in season and cheap. Don't forget that the stone can be a choking hazard for really little ones.

It's now more or less the end of the season for asparagus. As I explained in the May episode, asparagus has a very short season because the spears that we eat are actually the beginning of the shoot of the plant. So to avoid exhausting the plant by harvesting it all year, we cut some of the first shoots of the year and then we allow the rest of the plant to grow up tall to photosynthesise enough energy to put back into the soil for next year's crop.

So that reason asparagus is really only in season from when it first starts sprouting, which is in mid April until around the date of June the 21st, which is the traditional day we stop cutting asparagus. So make the most of these last three weeks of seasonal asparagus before it starts to dwindle out.

It's also more or less the end of the season for local rhubarb for a very similar reason. Rhubarb like asparagus needs to be picked less now so that the energy can be sent back down into the crown for next year, so farmers will tend to pick it less after June and it will become more expensive.

Another short May and June only crop is elderflowers. They're starting to turn to elderberries now. So if you wanted to do some fun picking of elderflowers to make cordial, the next couple of weeks pretty much is your last chance.

On the other hand, new potatoes are fully into season now. There's really nothing like the taste of a new potato with a little bit of butter. So it's really nice for children to see the difference between these waxy early potatoes and the fluffy potatoes that we call main crop potatoes that they get later in the season for chips or mash.

Children who haven't got very good peeling skills yet can help with new potatoes by scrubbing or scraping the thin skins and build their familiarity that way.

As well as the broad beans we mentioned last month, peas are everywhere now and they're so lovely straight from the pod. I covered them in more detail in the May episode, but there are also lots of mange-tout and sugar snaps around now, so children can explore eating the pod part rather than the pea inside. Those whole pod types hold up brilliantly in lunchboxes, but they can be quite expensive out of season and also quite tasteless, but at this time of year they taste incredibly fresh and green.

Lettuces and salads are also now in full swing and you should be able to get some lovely salad mixes locally if you're lucky enough to have a green grocer or a market nearby. I talked through some ways to get kids to explore salads in the May episode, so check that out if you want to encourage them.

If you want to try some new season greens with your kids, but they're not keen on raw greens, then consider cooking some pak choi as it's in season now too. So you can stir fry that and they can see how it wilts down and compare the texture between the soft floppy steamed leaves and the squeaky or crunchy stems. If they watch them cook they might be surprised how the leafy parts wilt down but the stems don't change shape much.

And now that we're into summer, it's the beginning of courgette season. So if you grow them, you'll have had a few baby ones coming through already and we're just getting ready for being inundated. Don't forget you can eat the flowers. They're really lovely fried in a light batter or stuffed with cream cheese. But if you don't grow them, you'll start to notice the prices coming down in the shops and markets over the next few months and we'll cover them more in detail in midsummer.

French beans also start to be available in late June, so you might find you can get some of the UK grown ones instead of the imported ones from about this month.  A good small task for kids in the kitchen is to snap the stem end off the beans because it's quite a satisfying snapping feeling and sound and it builds their familiarity up even if they're not going to eat the beans afterwards.

Broccoli is also coming into season now, the regular fluffy headed one that we see in the shops, which is the calabrese types, the ones we call trees. If you have some broccoli, you can ask your child to pull off or snip off the florets from a head of broccoli while you're preparing it. They might also be interested in the fact, or indeed you might, that we can eat the stalks. Broccoli stalks are actually packed with nutrition. If you just slice off the gnarly outside bits and slice them thinly, they're lovely in stir fry, or you can steam them and stick them in your cauliflower and broccoli cheese. Just make them smaller pieces than the florets because they're obviously denser and they need more time to cook through, or you can pre-steam them or pop them in the microwave with a splash of water before adding them in with the florets.

So that's the end of our UK grown fruits and vegetables.

And now for some seasonal imports for you that come from other countries because of their tropical climates but that we like to eat here and that are currently in season.

Bananas and plantain are basically in season most of the year round because of the way that they're grown, so you can have your bananas in your lunchbox.

Pineapple, although you can buy pineapple all year round because of the way that they're stored, they are in peak season from sort of March to July-ish, so we're right in the middle of it now. It's always quite fun for children to see the difference between an actual pineapple and the rings that you get in a tin and taste the difference if they want to.

 It's still too early in the season for UK nectarines and peaches but you might be able to find some imported nectarines knocking about from about now.

And it's right at the beginning of the season for all kinds of melons but even though it's quite early on you might notice that the prices are starting to fall now or when you buy them, they might take slightly less time to ripen up when you get them home.

So that's my summary of the foods that are in season this month. I hope that's given you something nice to put on your shopping list this week. As always, if you want a full list of the foods in season, go to thefoodies.org and click on free stuff and you'll find there's a page with June foods and activities in it. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. We also sell some bright fun printables with characters on them on the website for a couple of quid each. You can put them on the fridge each month to encourage children to choose some of the foods to buy and explore.

Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed this list of seasonal foods. Next week I'll run through a few child-friendly family recipes that you can use these foods in. But before that, I'll see you on the next episode. And in the meantime, happy eating.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

01:13 UK grown June seasonal foods

08:37 Imported June seasonal foods

09:37 Summary and outro