Foods in season in March – Food For Kids Podcast episode 80

Joanne Roach (00:13)

Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. It's the start of March and there are undeniable signs that spring is round the corner. So here are your March foods to add to your shopping lists and get kids to explore.

I give you this list of seasonal foods each month because they'll normally be a little bit cheaper and a bit better for the planet, but also because they often taste better in season so it's a good time to help kids to explore fruit and veg when they taste their best.

At the start of March, it doesn't really feel that much different to February but by the end of this quite long month, the world feels a lot different. The days are feeling much longer, there are more intermittent blue sky days, and the tones of green are multiplying everywhere you look as the soil warms up and everything comes back to life.

This means that there are the beginnings of new crops in gardens and fields, so this month we do have a couple of new season things to add, as well as the winter favourites to use up. Over the next couple of months, the list of food will get little shorter as some of those winter staples fade away and the new season hasn't really caught up yet, but then we'll bounce back after May to a world of new tastes. So for now, let's just enjoy the little bits of new green that we do have.

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

So for UK foods, as I mentioned, there are a couple of new season foods which I'll run through first and then we'll go back through some of the winter storage foods as well as the last few hardy plants standing through the end of winter. And then we'll finally see what imported seasonal foods we can get from warmer parts of the world.

A lot of the food lists will feel pretty familiar from the last couple of months of winter lists, but with a couple of extra bright bits thrown in for a mix of comfort meals and spring foods to explore with your children.

So in our short list of new season foods we already discussed rhubarb in the last couple of months, it's really getting going in March and if you grow it you can make a good couple of small pickings this month before it really ramps up in April.

And last month I mentioned the beginnings of purple sprout in broccoli are around now, and will be for the next couple of months. Purple Sprouting Broccoli, unlike the Calabrese types that are the ones we're most familiar with in the shops, those ones with the large, compact head of green florets, Purple Sprouting is a spear forming type, very like the green varieties that are sold as tender stem in packs in the supermarket.

The Calabrese type we're more familiar with is really a summer and autumn crop and they mostly die down after the first frosts and they have a single or main floret head that gets cut in one go. Although in a veg patch, if you actually leave the plant after cutting it, it will often send up a few smaller heads for a second harvest. But purple sprouting broccoli and other spear forming broccolis grow over a very long period, putting on just leaves and stem through the first growing season. They look like they're doing absolutely nothing at all. But then in the late winter and into the spring, they suddenly put out these flowering stems and that's the spear like florets that we eat. You can get several harvests off one plant by cutting them and then letting the plant recover and flower again from the cut point. So they're a brilliant plant to bring some colour to the garden and colour and new flavour to the ends of the dark winter and into spring.

Because they take up ground space for much longer than the summer varieties that can be dug up as soon as they've been harvested, they're not as popular commercially and so therefore the prices of them in the shops can be little bit higher, like the tender stem green ones. But they are delicious with the slimmer tasty stems and the small heads.

Interestingly, the purple part of the broccoli, the little fluffy heads, generally turn green when you cook them and they go greener the longer you cook them. The purple colour comes from an antioxidant called anthocyanin and the colour degrades in prolonged heat or alkaline conditions and because UK tap water is slightly alkaline, if you cook it in water for a while it will fade away. So instead, steam it lightly or blanch it in boiling water for just a short time or sauté it or roast it. Adding a little acid to the cooking water to offset the alkalinity can sometimes help too, like a spoon of lemon juice. Purple sprouting broccoli is delicious and the different shape and colour to regular broccoli can make it lot of fun to explore with kids. They can even watch it in a pan of water to see when it starts to lose its purple colour and then decide when to take it out.

While we are on green goodies. another new season food that will become more available over the next month is spring greens. They’re usually available in relatively inexpensive packs with two or three heads in the supermarket or bunches at the greengrocer or market. In a veg patch you can pick them as you need them.

They look like cabbage plants look when they first start to grow, a cluster of tall leaves. And then if left to form cabbages, more leaves would appear from the middle in layers to form a bulky tight head in the middle. So spring greens are basically just the outside early leaves of a spring cabbage. The varieties that we buy in the shops though are chosen on purpose to be good for picking at this time of year to fill a gap in the shops, but if you grow cabbages you can basically just harvest some early and get the same effect. They are thinner-leaved cabbages than the winter ones we've just been eating, with a flavour that, for lack of a better adjective, tastes really green. They are lovely sautéed with butter or oil, steamed or added to mashed potato, shredded into soups and stews, or any way you would use a little cabbage.

And then our last new spring crop is one which grows in the wild but a few people do grow it to buy, which is wild garlic. Wild garlic grows in woodland areas and under shade and it's only available for a couple of months at this time of year. At first it just looks like a spring bulb that's going to have a tulip or something on top, but it forms clusters of vibrant green smooth leaves and then gets pretty white flowers on little stems. It grows most places that you find bluebells and you can't mistake the garlicky smell when you walk through it. It's a lovely food to sauté or cook really lightly so it doesn't lose that garlicky taste in the leaves and it makes incredible pesto instead of using basil. You can forage for wild garlic, although make sure you keep to all the foraging rules about getting permission and only taking a small amount. I'll link to a webpage about that in the show notes. And if you're not knowledgeable about foraging, then obviously get some advice first because wild garlic looks very similar to another wild plant called Lords and Ladies, as well as Lily of the Valley, both of which are toxic to eat, so don't take any risks, take some advice. But if you can get hold of some from a market or greengrocer, it's absolutely lovely to explore with children because it's fun to compare the smell of bulb garlic with the leaves of wild garlic. You can get them to sniff the two and talk about which is stronger or which they like better and even compare them after cooking some.

So that's the new spring offerings and let's go back through some of the stalwart winter staples that are still holding up for us.

The purple sprouting broccoli and spring greens I mentioned are not the only brassica family crops that are great right now. We still have winter cabbages and kale as well as cauliflower going strong and they're still great to eat. A week or so ago, I put out an episode all about choosing, storing and using up brassica crops. And there are loads of family-friendly recipe ideas on that episode for cabbage, kale, broccoli and cauliflower. So in the show notes, I'll link to that episode page where there are lots of links to recipes.

Leaks are still at their peak, they have dealt well with the cold weather and they are fat and oniony right now, so it's a great time to make a leek and potato soup or even combine them with some wild garlic if you like. Over next couple of months, as the temperature starts to warm up, they will start to want to do their second year thing, which is to send up flowers and set seed. The flowers they create are big pom poms on stalks, like huge balls of fireworks. If you've ever grown ornamental alliums in your flower garden, you'll know how pretty they are. But in order to do that, they thicken up a stalk inside the leek and you lose a lot of the edible layers. So now it's getting towards the end of the time to eat the leeks that we grew outside last year.

All of our winter stored veggies are still going strong. Carrots, parsnips, swede and onions, although they too will want to start sprouting as we come into the warmer months. So it's our last couple of months to enjoy the ones harvested late last year. You might still have an odd few in a veggie patch if you have one, but they will need taking up now before they decide to try flowering.

And also in storage, we still have some apples and winter squashes. Eating apples are getting towards the end of their life in store now, unless they're in a commercial cool store. So you can still get them in the shops from the UK, but less so from local markets. Cooking apples, however, store more reliably. So you can probably still find UK grown apples for an apple pie or crumble.

Squashes will be starting to soften up now, so if you've grown and stored them, keep a much more regular eye on them as they can start to go to mush quickly, but the shop bought ones are kept in cold stores, so there's still some of those around.

So that's the list of UK grown foods, a lot of the back end of winter staples, but with some lush new green bits thrown in.

And now for a few foods that are imported but are at their seasonal best right now.

We're still in peak citrus season with lots of the Southern European citrus joining the party since February, so that's lemons, oranges, grapefruit to bring a bit of sunshine inside the house, now there's a little bit outside too. And after a bit of a lull during deep winter, some sources of mangoes are coming back online in March. And of course, because of the way they're grown and stored, we always have access to bananas, plantain and pineapple. It's nice for children to see the difference between fresh pineapple and canned rings. They are both lovely in different ways, but children can find it funny how the fresh ones have a little astringency that can make their nose wrinkle, but alongside something so sweet.

So that’s the March roundup of seasonal food. It's got a little bit of hopeful green shoots creeping in to liven up some of the end of winter favourites. Hopefully this will give you some ideas of what to pick up on your next shopping trip. See if your child can pick out a couple to find in the shops for you so they can build their familiarity. 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 March foods as we look forward to spring. But I'll be back with another non-seasonal episode in between, so I hope you'll join me then. And in the meantime, happy eating!

00:00 Introduction

01:32 UK grown March seasonal foods

08:52 Imported March seasonal foods

09:36 Summary and outro