Foods in season in January- Food For Kids Podcast episode 63

Joanne Roach (00:14)

Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. It's the start of January and the start of a new calendar year, so it's time for our regular monthly run through of seasonal foods for the month. So here are your January foods to add to your shopping list and get kids to explore. Each month I give you this list of seasonal foods because not only are they normally a little bit cheaper and a bit better for the planet, but because they often taste better in season, you can sometimes use that as a hook to get children involved in exploring fruit and vegetables.

We're coming off the back of a bunch of holidays right now and whatever your family celebrates, chances are you've eaten quite a lot of indulgent food over the last couple of weeks, which is lovely, but you might be looking forward to a more normal routine of family food. So why not start with some seasonal fruit and veg to build some of those meals around? So let's get started with what's in the shop that was grown in the UK right now.

Because January in the UK is pretty cold and the days are short, we don't have many foods that are still outside being harvested right now. So that will be a very quick run through and then we'll go back through some of the winter favourites that were harvested in late autumn but store well through the winter and then onto some seasonal imported treats from places where January is warmer.

There won't be many foods on this list that you haven't already heard in the last couple of months. They are our winter standbys that will see us through until the new first crops in late March, but they're still really tasty and at their best and worth exploring with kids. I'll start with crops that could still be growing outside if you have a veggie patch because they are cold hardy.

We have discussed the weird and wonderful Jerusalem artichokes back in November. They're not that common in the shops, but they are able to sit in cold ground over winter. So if you grow some or have a farmers market or good greengrocers nearby, you might be able to get some still. If they're left in the ground until the soil warms up, each tuber will just start sprouting a whole new plant. So in the next month or so those last ones that we want to actually eat need to be taken out. Cold hardy greens like Brussels sprouts and cabbage are still fine outside so you can pick them in the garden or buy them pretty much everywhere. At the start of January you can usually find discounted Brussels sprouts as the shops try to sell off any that weren't sold for Christmas.

If you can find Brussels sprouts on stalks, that can be a lot of fun for children to see how they grow and they can snap off the little button sprouts from the stalks. If you just buy them in a bag, children can peel the dirty or scruffy outside leaves off each one, even if they're not going to eat them, it builds familiarity with them and helps them to see that they look like tiny little cabbages. If you also eat some cabbage in January, you can get the children to take some leaves off those too, so they can feel that the act of peeling and snapping is very similar, but just bigger in scale. This is especially true of crinkly types like Savoy, which feel much more like a giant Brussels sprout.

Cauliflower can still be found outside, but they've mostly been harvested now because the pretty white curds, which is the bit that we eat, can get damaged by the frost by being frozen and then defrosting. They're still totally edible, but they don't look as pretty in the supermarket. So farmers mostly harvest them early. As shoppers often reject scruffier looking veg. But they store really well and they're pretty hardy outside, so they taste great at this time of year.

Kale is super winter hardy and you can pick leaves all through the cold months. Kale grows up on a tall hard stalk and leaves keep coming out of the top as you pick the ones a little lower down, so you can keep harvesting many leaves from the same plant. Show your child a picture of a tall mature kale plant online, it looks a bit like a palm tree. There are lots of different types of kale involving curly frilly ones and crinkly types and then the flatter leaves with bobbles on which are usually called Cavalo Nero but people often call them dinosaur kale because the leaves look just like dinosaur skin. So that's quite a fun one to share with kids while they help you wash the leaves.

The only mainstream UK crop that is a truly new season crop in January is forced rhubarb. You may already know this, but forcing something is a way of growing it where you block the light over the top of the plant towards the end of its growth to make it sprout quicker because it's trying to find the light. This can be either putting something over the top of it or putting it in a dark place. If you've ever accidentally left a seedling in bad light, you'll have noticed it grows tall and thin and very pale because it doesn't have enough light to photosynthesise, so you don't get that bright green colour from the chlorophyll.

This process of growing tall and thin towards the light is called etiolation. Although you get longer, quicker growth, plants who do this are usually quite weak, so it isn't ideal because they can tend to topple over or are more prone to disease. So why would you do this on purpose? Because for some plants with strong flavours like rhubarb, sea kale, some types of celery and some types of asparagus, forcing them to grow like this can get them a paler and slimmer profile and can often be a bit less bitter or less strong in flavour.

It also gives you a bit of a crop earlier because covering the plants gives them a bit more warmth as well as making them strain to grow a bit faster. So in rhubarb, this is often done in huge indoor dark sheds and that makes that beautiful bright pink stalk which are less stringy and a bit sweeter. However, forcing plants can exhaust them, so we can't do it with all plants all the time. So most rhubarb for the rest of the year is grown in normal light, which is why you'll usually find it has a more mixed pink and green stem the rest of the year. If you're interested in exploring rhubarb with your kids, then do a search on the rhubarb triangle. This is a nine square mile area in Yorkshire where the most forced rhubarb is grown and you can find cool time lapse videos of rhubarb growing up in these dark sheds.

If your child is up for trying rhubarb but they don't like the stewed fruit texture, especially the stringiness of rhubarb, will link in the show notes to a recipe for rhubarb cookies, which are a really good way to try it in a familiar sweet snack.

And then one plant that is growing outside and will start to come more into its own over the next couple of months but is definitely tasty now is leeks. They are very cold hardy and taste great in winter. They bulk up as they get older and the weather warms up so they'll be slimmer now than they will be in early March but they're still peak season and they taste lovely and oniony. You could make a leek and potato soup this month with onions, garlics and leeks fried off at the start and your child could help with some of the prep. That way they could see how three different plants that are in the same plant family look different or the same and how similar and different they smell too.

Apart from these foods that are still growing, we still have lots of foods that great in storage, the most obvious being all the root vegetables that we've explored in the last couple of months. Parsnips are usually pretty cheap in January because they're produced in a glut to be ready for the big rush at Christmas dinner for roast parsnips, so there's usually an excess to use up in the shops about now. So Google some nice recipes for parsnips, even if they have to go into the freezer for a bit. Children can enjoy peeling parsnips because they're a bit fatter and easier to hold on a chopping board to peel than a slim carrot, and also the flesh is bit more fibrous so it can peel a bit slower than a carrot. So they're great for practicing a bit of peeling.

Swedes and turnips can stand in the ground in a veg patch through the winter, but most shop ones were harvested before Christmas, so you might find some bargains there too. Making different mashes of vegetables and trying them next to mashed potato can be a lot of fun. If you do that, remember to always focus on describing flavours or comparing them with descriptive language rather than whether something is a binary, nice or nasty yuck or yum. So for example, is this one earthier tasting than that one? Is this one sweeter or more bitter? Is this like a cross between a potato and something else? If so, what? Which one's got the brightest colour? Which has got the smoothest texture? If your child is willing to test foods, then these critical descriptions take the need to approve out of the equation and puts them under less pressure. And don't forget the stored beetroot and carrots too at this time of year, which make very bright coloured mashes.

And while we're on stored food, don't forget there are still UK grown apples and pears, winter squashes and pumpkins in storage available in the shops. So look out for those too.

So that's our list of UK grown foods.

And now for a few foods that are imported but at their seasonal best right now. We're well and truly into the season for citrus fruits. So grapefruits, lemons, oranges of all kinds are wonderful right now. As well as the sweet and child-friendly oranges like clementines and satsumas, you can also now get Seville oranges, which are the slightly sourer but more full-flavoured oranges that we use for making marmalade. So if you fancy making some, you can look out for those now. Or you could compare one with a normal orange. They're really not very nice just to eat raw, but they are fun to have a comparison with an eating orange where everybody knows it's going to be a weird, sour mouthful to try for fun.

And as always, don't overlook how good those all year round staples like pineapple, bananas and plantains can be to break up these seasonal treats.

So that's the January roundup of seasonal food. It's a lot of the same food as the rest of the winter, but they are really great foods for making hearty, comforting meals for those miserable January days. And they're also full of fibre to give our system something to work with after all those lovely indulgences of the holidays. And the citrusy kicks from the oranges and lemons can perk up the dark days with something bright, acid and sweet. Hopefully this will give you some ideas of what to pick up in your next shopping trip. And why not ask your child to find any of the vegetables that are on sale after the holidays so you can find a bargain and make something nice together with it. They could help you find a recipe for something that needs using up either online or in a cookbook where they would see lots of images of foods and build their familiarity that way.

If you want a written list of seasonal foods 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 January foods, but I'll be back in between with a regular episode, so I hope you'll join me then, and in the meantime, happy eating!

00:00 Introduction

01:11 UK grown January seasonal foods

08:26 Imported January seasonal foods