Foods in season in September – Food For Kids Podcast episode 28

Joanne Roach (00:13)

Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. It's the start of September, so it's time for that regular monthly run through of seasonal foods for the month. So here are your September foods to add to your shopping lists and tempt your children with. This is the peak of harvest season in the UK and before we slip into autumn, it's time to make the most of the abundance around and to hoover up some of those summer specials. Using a seasonal focus is a brilliant way to get kids involved in exploring fruit and vegetables when they're at their freshest cheapest and tastiest. So let's see what's coming out of UK farms right now.

Apples are one of the most familiar fruits for children and the first of the UK apple harvest begins in September. So you should start to see some more local apples available in the shops. If your child likes sweet crisp apples like Pink Ladies or those mini apples that supermarkets bag up for lunch boxes, then they might like some UK varieties like Discovery or Katy which are available from September onwards.

Apples in the autumn tend to be crisper and firmer than later in the winter when the stored ones can be a little bit softer and sometimes a bit grainier. So it's good to help children to understand that apples change with storage and different varieties taste different. This can be helpful to explore away from a meal time if you've got children who tend to get anxious when foods are not predictable and uniform.

Often children like things like nuggets or branded foods because they know exactly what taste and texture they're going to get. So if they're caught unawares by an apple that has a very different texture to the last time they ate it, can knock their confidence. But if you buy two or three different apples and explore them together and describe what's different about them, it can take the mystery out of it. In September and October, you can find apple fairs in some towns. So that's a really wonderful way to explore apples. But honestly, just getting three different single apples from the shops and playing with those is a really good place to start.

Blackberries are one of the real highlights of September. You'll see them on hedgerows everywhere now and in supermarkets too. If you're out for a walk, take a tub with you and see if you can collect a few. A brilliant free way for children to connect with where their food comes from. Just make sure you only pick from places where dogs can't have peed and not too near lots of traffic with exhaust fumes.I have a blog post on my website with instructions for children to learn about how to collect blackberries safely and what to do with them. I'll put a link in the show notes.

If your child isn't very adventurous with berries, You could let them explore blackberries away from the plate by using them to paint with seeing how purple the juice is on a plate and on their fingers. Make sure to wear an apron or some old clothes or by doing one of the activities that's in this month's Little Foodies Club box, which is to crush them up and then use a paint brush to actually paint the juice onto sugar paper. It's a really fun way to build familiarity with the fruit without actually having to eat it.

And speaking of things with very vibrant juice, beetroot is also very good at the moment. If you've only ever bought it vacuum packed and already cooked, then try roasting some fresh beetroots wrapped up in foil in their skins. They're very sweet and earthy.

Like with blackberry juice, children can explore how beetroots stain everything bright pink, their fingers, the chopping boards, be warned. If you add a small amount of mashed beetroot to mashed potato, it turns bright pink without really tasting very strong. And if you're a family that likes risotto, then I can definitely recommend neon pink beetroot risotto with a little bit of strong cheddar added in at the end.

Butternut squash is starting to appear now too, although it will become more abundant over the next couple of months. They are slightly sweeter than summer squash and have a denser texture. They're brilliant roasted and they can be a gentle introduction to squash for children because of their softer flavour compared to some other varieties. They're not too far off from a carrot sort of flavour. If they're not keen on this kind of texture then squash is also brilliant added as a thickener to other things like soup or curries or stews and you can blend or mash it to break down the texture so you can't notice it.

For grown-up flavours they pair brilliantly with chickpeas and a range of curries and middle eastern stews. Just try Googling butternut squash plus chickpea and see how many things come up. They freeze brilliantly, either raw or cooked, so if you have one that's starting to go soft at the neck, then get it in the freezer for another day. You can listen to last week's episode on storing squashes for more advice about freezing.

Speaking of carrots, carrots are very much year-round staples, but in September we get this year's main crop carrots. So that's the first of the full size roots. They are firm and sweet. And if you can get them with the top still attached, it's really fun for children to see that connection to the soil. And you can eat the leafy tops in salad or adding to a stir fry or children can just give them a nibble to see if they can taste the slight carrotiness in the leaves.

Cauliflower is excellent right now as well if your child doesn't like it boiled try roasting florets with a little oil until it's golden and nutty. Another child-friendly idea is to make cauliflower cheese but bake it in little muffin tins so you have tiny cheesy cauliflower bites rather than a big dish.

Celeriac and celery are both available this month. Celeriac looks quite gnarly on the outside, but once it's peeled, it's a mild, nutty root vegetable With a kind of faint taste of celery, somewhere halfway between a celery and a parsnip, it's really nice roasted, it can work well mashed with potatoes and it's also excellent grated and mixed with grated potatoes in a rosti.

And ordinary celery obviously is always a fun vegetable to try dipping into different dips if your child is up for that kind of thing.

Chard is also ramping up now and will be available all through into the winter. If you haven't had it before, it's basically like a big spinachy leaf but with thick stems. The stalks are often really brightly coloured, red, yellow and orange, and children often love the way they look. Just strip the leaves from the stalks. This is actually a fun job for kids to do either with their hands or scissors if they're practicing their scissors skills. You can chop the stalks and saute them a bit like you would with celery or onions or add them into soups and stews. But the leaves just cook down in minutes like spinach.

Courgettes are still coming obviously and in many gardens starting to turn into marrows as the gardeners can't keep up with them. Marrows can be hollowed out and stuffed with almost anything which can look quite fun on the plate. So pick a family favourite and stuff a little bit into a ring of marrow. You can also just add cubes of marrow as thickeners to other dishes a bit like with the butternut squash into things like soup or curry. And marrow also makes a great kind of neutral flavoured base for a lot of mixed jams. We always every year make a World War Two recipe jam, is marrow and ginger, which is delicious.

Cucumbers are coming towards the end of their peak production, but they should still be around for a while yet and they should be cheaper and tastier. So make the most of them for lots of dipping and cubes in the lunchbox. Did you know you can stir fry them too? They're really nice. So if you have one that needs using up, try that.

Damsons and plums are at their best in September into early October. Damsons are very tart so they're better for cooking, whereas plums obviously can be eaten straight. Both are great baked into crumbles or you can stew them with a little sugar and something like cinnamon to swirl into porridge or yoghurt. We have a bunch of damson trees so we have damsons in all kinds of weird recipes but our favourite one is a damson ice cream.

Peppers are still really plentiful and there's quite a lot of UK grown ones around now. They tend to be smaller shaped ones, but you can get them. At the supermarket, you'll find that there's more reds and oranges and fewer greens in those big cheap family bags. So you can stock up on those and make some recipes for the freezer or just freeze some peppers in chunks or strips for cooking in the winter. They're obviously brilliant raw for dipping or you can roast a whole tray full to add to sauces later, to pop into a fajita or to blend into hummus. Just make the most of them now while there's so many red and yellow ones around.

The main crop potato harvest started in the last couple of weeks and it goes on in earnest for the next few weeks. Main crop means basically the main crop. So the bigger, longer grown varieties that the farmer takes up now and stores in cool, dark places to last us through the winter, as opposed to the small waxy potatoes earlier in the summer, which are called earlies. Main crops tend to be fluffier textured and better for things like jacket potatoes, mashed potato and those fluffy centres in your chips. So you might start to see better sized baking potatoes in the shops from now.

Raspberries are still going strong as well as the last few strawberries this year, so make the most of those before you start having to have them imported from glasshouses in much more expensive packets.

French beans are also finishing up, but there's still a few more weeks for runner beans, so take the chance to have the last of those fresh and local before switching to frozen beans in a few weeks' time.

Sweet corn is still at its absolute best. So if your children really like corn on the cob better than tinned or frozen kernels, then add in a few meals with corn on the cob in the next couple of weeks while they're still available fresh.

And then finally, the tomato season is tipping over and will start to wind down now into October. So if you like to try different varieties or you like to try and buy UK grown, then do add some to your shopping list this month to make the most of them as the ones grown under glass in the winter are never quite as tomato-y. OK, so that's it for the UK grown foods.

Joanne Roach (09:11)

Ok, now for a few foods that we mostly import but that are nevertheless at their seasonal best right now. Figs are available grown in the UK but not many people grow them so you'll still usually find the ones in the shops are imported. They are in the peak of their short but intense season right now. They're soft, sweet and juicy, quite different from dried figs. They have a weird texture because there are two or three different parts to them, so they're a good food to let children explore and describe rather than expect them to eat them straight away first time. We used to let our kids scoop them with a teaspoon or have very thin slices and then have little pieces of ham or cheese on the plate that they could alternate bites with to see which pairing they preferred, fig and cheese or fig and ham. Wait until they're very soft so that they're at peak sweetness.

Melons are lovely in September, especially watermelon and cantaloupe. If you've got one, children might like to use a melon baller to scoop out little spheres and put them into a fruit salad or put in drinks if you have a late summer barbecue.

And don't forget all year round available foods like pineapple, bananas and plantains. And don't forget all of those can be cooked as well. Plantain in particular is lovely fried in a little butter. They go sweet and caramelised and they hold together better than bananas.

Joanne Roach (10:25)

So that's the September roundup of seasonal food. It's a month of peak colour, flavour and variety leading up to our harvest festivals. Hopefully that will give you some ideas of what to pick up in your next shopping trip. Why not let your child pick out something to choose on the next trip? If you want a written list to work from, always, you'll find a link to the list on our website in the show notes or you can get one of our fun child-friendly printables to pop on the fridge.

In one of next week's episodes I'll share five family-friendly ideas for cooking with some of these September foods, but we'll have another episode on Thursday first and I hope you'll join me then. In the meantime, happy eating!

00:00 Introduction to seasonal foods in September

00:52 UK grown seasonal foods in September

09:11 Imported seasonal foods in September

10:25 Summary and outro