Foods in season in November – Food For Kids Podcast episode 46

Joanne Roach (00:13)

Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. It's the start of November, so it's time for the regular monthly run through of seasonal foods for the month. So here are your November foods to add to your shopping list and temperature children with. We try to help you choose some seasonal foods each month because it's cheaper and good for the planet, but it's also a brilliant way to get children involved in exploring fruit and vegetables when they're at their freshest and their tastiest.

So now most of the high summer foods are over, but we have the very beginnings of those lovely winter foods instead, which feels nice because we're in the last stages of autumn now and it does feel colder and cosier. So let's start with what's in the shops that was grown in the UK right now.

Apples and pears are finishing up being fresh off the trees now and you will still find the occasional box of windfalls around but as the month goes on they will empty out. But many varieties of apples and pears store well in a cool dark place so if you or a neighbour have fruit trees then you can potentially be eating different varieties right through into the spring.

Here's some interesting facts about how commercial apples and pears work. They're usually kept in big, cool stores with special ventilation systems that keep the humidity exactly right but also circulate the air properly so that a gas that these fruits give off as they ripen, which is called ethylene, can be removed. This is because ethylene can speed up ripening of anything in the same space. So that's why you should never store apples, pears or bananas near other things because they make them go off quicker. Or alternatively, if you want something to ripen up, like if you've got green tomatoes, you should put them near apple, pears or bananas. So yes, anyway, commercial fruit farms can keep apples and pears in a kind of limbo state for a lot longer with these special storage systems, which is why you can still buy UK grown pears up to about Christmas and UK grown apples well into the spring if you don't mind looking for them a bit and eating varieties that have stored well. But in the meantime, in November, make the most of the last few fresh ones coming out of farms before we get into the storage ones.

At the time of recording this, start of November, lots of you will have leftover pumpkin from Halloween and I've talked about this before. But if you want something very cheap to eat that will also help with environmental food waste, have a look in the shops now that Halloween is over and you can usually buy their leftover pumpkins for 50p or less to get rid of them. You can cut them up or make puree and pop that in the freezer to eat another time if you have space in there or you can just store whole pumpkins on the worktop for a few weeks and use them in all the ways that I went through in episode 43. So that's a really good money saving tip. Butternut squashes are also still in season and the last few ones are coming out of the gardens now and farms as the frost is killing off the last of their leaves.

So, as I said in the intro, we're at the start of enjoying the winter foods now and a big category of that is root vegetables, which means that it's the swollen root of the plant that we eat, even though not all of them are actually underground. Parsnips and carrots with their long tapered roots are underground of course, but swedes, turnips, beetroots and kohlrabi all have the majority of their roots sitting just on the soil surface.

An interesting thing to know about root veg is that they're actually two-year plants that have evolved to store the energy of the plant to get it through the winter so that it's able to flower and set seed the next year. We eat them in year one, but the plant in nature wants to survive to year two to reproduce. So this is why the roots tend to taste nicer as they get into winter, because the plant is storing more energy in them as sugars and starches.

The two root veg that this is very noticeable for is carrots and particularly parsnips because they grow underground, they do a clever thing to stop their roots from freezing in the hard winter ground. When they know it's winter, which is usually after the first frost or two, they convert a lot of their starches to sugar because sugar is harder to freeze. So this is why sometimes with carrots, but always with parsnips, it's better to eat them the first frosts because they will taste sweeter. So when you notice a hard frost, make a note to put parsnips on your shopping list. If you want to explore parsnips with kids, you can explain that before explorers bought potatoes back from the Americas, we mostly ate parsnips and turnips for our starchy filling foods. So they can try pretending that we never had a potato and see what they think of parsnips as chips or mash instead.

Another plant that tastes better after a frost for similar reasons of changing its composition to cope with the cold is leeks. A lot of the leeks around now are still quite slim and they will bulk up over the winter into spring next year because they're happy staying in the ground but they will start to taste their best later this month. Leeks are fun to explore with kids if you slice them into rings or if they're old enough and have good enough knife skills they could do it too, and then they can then use their fingers and thumbs to pop all the rings out of their concentric circle. This makes them easier to cook but it's also a lot of fun to do.

And the final family of foods that actually taste better once the weather turns cold is most brassicas, which is the name for the family that includes all the leafy, cabbagey and mustardy plants. So winter cabbages like Savoy that have thick crinkly leaves, most Kales and even Chard all taste better after a bit of cold weather because they also change to help their leaves cope with freezing air. In particular, Brussels sprouts definitely taste better after a decent period of cold. And although we think of turnips and swedes as root crops because it's the swollen root that we eat, they're actually brassica plants and their leaves are actually totally edible. But we've just bred them over hundreds of years to have bigger root balls to eat.

Obviously it's too cold for salad leaves now, they would mostly just be mush after the first frost, but there are some salads that can grow in cold weather, many of them in a cold greenhouse or under cover, but some even outside, so you can still find some UK grown salad crops if you look. Two slightly more unusual leafy veg that can grow outside and also taste better in the cold are chicory and radicchio or radicchio which are in the same family and have very similar rugby ball shaped heads that have thicker leaves. Chicory tends to be very pale green, almost white, whereas most radicchio, and I'm sure I'm not saying that how the Italians would say it, is a bright deep purple red. You will often find bits of these in salad mixes. The pieces that are a bit thicker and crinklier in a big bag of salad is often chicory and radicchio. They put them in salad bags because they tend to take longer to go soft and slimy than most lettuces, so it bulks them out. You can eat them raw in a salad, where they provide a slightly bitter bite, chicory less so than radicchio, but there is a definite edge to them. They are also both lovely cooked, grilled or pan fried or with stuff piled into the big leaves and roasted.

If you want to explore these with children you could get one of them and ask them to try a leaf and compare it to a leaf of romaine lettuce because although they're similar shapes they will taste pretty different. If you get something nice to dip them both into this can be a lot of fun and these winter varieties will actually hold the dip more without flopping than a lettuce leaf would.

Lastly I have a slightly unusual one for you to track down which is Jerusalem artichokes. If you've never had these before, these are not actually a relative of the globe artichoke at all. In fact, they are a type of sunflower and they are often called sun chokes. They look quite like a sunflower when they're growing, they grow tall with big thick stems and they have flower heads on that look like a sunflower but are bit smaller and the bit that we eat is the swollen tuber root under the ground which we dig up in winter. They can survive in all weathers so they can be harvested any time during the winter. They look like a small gnarly potato or a big piece of ginger and they have a very unusual taste, the best way to describe it is if a potato, a nut and a parsnip all had a baby. They're absolutely lovely roasted and they play well with creamy flavours like in a creamy soup.

They contain a lot of something called inulin, which is a kind of prebiotic starch that is very good for our gut health because it isn't digested easily and stays in our guts and feeds certain beneficial bacteria. I'm mentioning this fact because they're very good for us but the result of this is something that can make children find them fascinating which is that they can make you very gassy especially when you first eat them. In fact our kids used to call them farty chokes. This is because they're feeding those beneficial bacteria who are very excited to see some new food and when they digest them they create a lot of gas. For this reason, don't eat a lot when you first have them, just have a small portion and build up over time. A couple of pieces of roasted ones on the side of your roast potatoes is a much better start than a huge bowl of Jerusalem artichoke soup. You can reduce the effect a bit by using some acid like citrus or vinegar in the cooking process as that breaks down a little bit of the starch or you can slow roast or add fennel seeds and that also helps a bit. But it's a good thing for us and if your child is game to try a teeny bit and then see if it makes them fart a few hours later it's a fun experiment or if they're reluctant they can just watch you eat some and then count your farts instead.

So that's a silly end to the UK-grown foods.

And now for a few foods that are imported but are their seasonal best right now. Like the chicory and radicchio, thicker leaves like pak choi and Chinese greens are good at this time of year, as well as the sweet potatoes that will have been harvested over the last few weeks. For fruit, we're just starting to get into the winter oranges, so starting with smaller ones like clementines, which are great for children to learn to peel for themselves, and even if they don't want to eat them, you could ask them to peel one for you and that will build their familiarity all the same. Mangos and melons are now readily available and we're just getting into pomegranate season too so that's a fun one to get your child to bash the seeds out. And don't forget all year round available foods like pineapple, bananas and plantains.

So that's the November roundup of seasonal food. And although we have reluctantly said goodbye to lots of our soft summer favourites, we now get to look forward to a bunch of veg that have evolved to be best in winter. And they'll only get better over the cold months as we make lots of hearty comforting things with them. 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, as 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 stick on the fridge.

In one of next week's episodes, I'll share five family-friendly ideas for cooking with some of these November foods but I'll be back with another non-seasonal related episode on Thursday this week. So I hope you'll join me then. And in the meantime, happy eating.

00:00 Introduction

01:00 UK grown November seasonal foods

09:37 Imported November seasonal foods

10:24 Summary and outro