Foods in season in December – Food For Kids Podcast episode 54

Joanne Roach (00:13)

Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. It's the start of December, so it's time for the regular monthly run through of seasonal foods for the month. So here are your December foods to add to your shopping list and get your kids to explore. Each month I give you this list of seasonal foods because generally they're a bit cheaper and better for the planet, but also because they often taste better in season, it's a helpful way to get children involved in exploring fruit and veg.

Well, I don't know about you, but it definitely feels like winter to me now. The heating is on. We've had a couple of really hard frosts which have frozen the car windscreens, but also killed off all of the tender leaves on plants in the garden. So we are definitely into the season of winter hardy fruits and vegetables, a lot of which I introduced last month, as well as the foods that store well over winter.

So let's start with what's in the shops that was grown in the UK right now.

Now that we've had those hard frosts, we can definitely start enjoying the foods that taste better after the frost. So if you didn't hear last month's episode, explained that many plants have defence mechanisms to store starches and sugars to get through the cold winter, and this means that they taste sweeter and fuller after the cold really kicks in. This includes many root crops, some crinkly-leaved crops and things like leeks too.

So root vegetables are definitely a good bet now and also pretty cheap as they have been mostly dug up by farmers now for winter storage. In a veg patch at home, you can leave a lot of them in the ground, but commercial farmers generally don't want to take the risk of the ground being frozen when they need to harvest them. So they often take them up and store them in cool dark conditions ready to send off to shops.

One great way to buy root veg in December is that you'll be seeing a lot of the supermarkets doing their Christmas vegetable packs throughout this month. That usually includes some combination of carrots, parsnips, swede or turnip. Occasionally you'll find some with onions or red cabbage thrown in too. Sometimes you can get these packs of root veg for literally pence with your store loyalty card or they can be reduced down in price in the last day or two before Christmas and between Christmas and New Year. So if you have freezer space, consider getting some extra and prepping them to put in the freezer to not only save money, but also to have some things prepped and ready for the miserable January days. And also if you get them between Christmas and New Year, you can help to reduce some supermarket waste.

All of those root veg are great for soups and stews, and you can also just par-cook or roast them and then freeze them, ready to make an easy side dish in January. At the time of recording this, at the start of December, you're probably also starting to think about holiday family gatherings and any food that you might be making.

 If you're a family that celebrates Christmas with all the trimmings, then don't forget that you can prep quite a lot of them ahead and freeze them if you have space. I'll put a link in the show notes back to episode 49 where I talk through ways to make space in the kitchen and things that you can prep ahead, and there are loads of links on those show notes about how to par-cook and freeze common celebration dinner items.

So, apart from root veg, the other great winter favourites in season are leafy brassicas like cabbage, kale and Brussels sprouts. Winter varieties of cabbage tend to have either thicker leaves and stalks or crinkly thick leaves like savoy-style ones. Cabbage and kales can actually be grown all year round with the right techniques, but these thicker hardier types really come into their own now. So pick up a savoy cabbage this week or a bag of kale.

And there's also a reason that Brussels sprouts are such a Christmas dinner staple, they taste less bitter and more fully rounded after some cold weather. So if you buy fresh ones or one of those stalks filled with the little button sprouts now, they'll be tasting pretty delicious if you like them that is.

If your child's really hesitant with sprouts or kale or thick cabbages, can I suggest stir frying or roasting them rather than steaming or boiling so that you get that nice charred flavour to round them out? Children can often really go for, or at least tolerate, cabbage, kale and sprouts when they're chopped or shredded and added to pasta with some bacon if you eat meat or grated cheese on top. Mine always liked them with an Asian style sauce on noodles because those long shreds of leaves blended in with the noodles. Both cabbage and kale can be fun for children to explore by helping to strip the leaves off the thick stalks and Brussels sprouts are fun to peel the dirty or damaged outer leaves off so that's something to build familiarity even if they don't want to eat them.

Another winter crop that's fun to strip the leaves off is chard and that also pairs great with pasta for the pasta fanatics in your house. And to round things off with things that you wouldn't think immediately to pair with pasta but works, is leeks, which also taste better after some cold weather. You can of course also pair leeks with anything potato or cheese related and a lot of those recipes are great for kids too. Stir fried leeks added to a mac and cheese or a cheese sauce over a jacket potato are great combinations.

Two foods which are really great at Christmas, especially for vegetarians or alongside meat dishes, is chestnuts and mushrooms. Mushrooms can be cultivated pretty much year round, so there's only really seasons for some wild types of mushrooms. But they are great for adding meaty umami-ish flavours to foods, and they're brilliant in things like veggie Wellingtons for a non-meat centrepiece. Chestnuts have actually finished their season in nature in October and November, so you won't be able to forage for them now. But if you're buying them from the shops, it's a great time because this year's crop has had time to be processed, packaged and sent into stores. So you can now usually find the vacuum packs of this year's crop if you want to use one of those for one of your veggie alternatives or in your stuffings.

OK, so that's the list of UK grown foods. There's definitely some hardy winter comfort foods in there.

Okay, so now for a few foods that are imported but are at their seasonal best right now. It's the end of the season for fresh dates, so this month you might still be able to find some fresh ones around, but the newer season dried ones will start to be available from now on. They're great to add sweetness to lots of foods and you can help children to explore them by finding a date caramel recipe online and whizzing that up with them to dip things in and see if they can tell it isn't caramel. Date caramel sauce is also really nice, watered down a bit and drizzled over popcorn.

It's the beginning of the season of bright citrus fruits, so grapefruit are starting in December and through the next few months. They're very sharp, so they're quite fun for just exploring sour flavours with kids. They can dip their finger in or squeeze a little juice out and see how it compares to lemons or oranges and even rate it between 1 and 10 for sourness and sweetness.

Satsumas and clementines are also really peak season now, so that's the reason we put them in our stockings. They were a precious midwinter source of vitamins, and because they were so precious they are used to symbolise the gold from one of the original Santa Claus stories. The story goes that St Nicholas threw a sack of gold down the chimney of a poor man who couldn't afford a dowry for his three daughters and the gold fell into their stockings which were hanging on the chimney to dry. So the bright oranges symbolise this bright shiny gold.

And finally, two small bright fruits associated with winter wealth and jewels and that you find on lot of holiday dishes are pomegranates and cranberries, which are both coming to an end in late November, early December, but because they store well, they'll be good right through into the festive season.

And as always, don't forget all year round available foods like pineapple, bananas and plantains.

So that's the December roundup of seasonal food. It's really lovely to see how many of our holiday recipes have been built over the ages to work around the foods that were available before fridges and freezers. And so you don't have to compromise much between holiday foods and seasonal veggies. Hopefully this will give you some ideas of what to pick up in your next shopping trip.

And why not ask your child to pick out some of the vegetables for the big family dinners when you go next. These big family meals can be quite overwhelming for kids, but if they've been involved in choosing or prepping some of the ingredients, it can give them something to focus on when they're sitting at a table full of dishes that they might only see once a year. 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 your fridge.

In one of next week's episodes, I'll share five family-friendly ideas for cooking with some of these December foods and not just regular holiday dishes. 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

01:12 December seasonal foods grown in the UK

06:08 Imported December seasonal foods

07:57 Summary and outro