Foods in season in May – Food For Kids Podcast episode 98

Joanne Roach (00:13)

Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. It's the start of May and everything's quite warm and green outside so here are your May foods to add to your shopping list and get your kids to explore. I give you this list of seasonal foods each month because they'll normally be a bit cheaper and a bit better for the planet but also because they often taste better in season so it's a good way to help kids to explore fruit and veg when they taste their best.

This will be a relatively short list, because for those of you that don't grow food, you may not know, but May is the last of the three months, March to May, that have traditionally been called the hungry gap in the UK. And that phrase, the hungry gap, means that it's the time of year where actually if you were relying on food that you'd grown, then you would be the hungriest. Because we've come out of winter with all the things that we've stored over the winter. So all those things like carrots and parsnips and potatoes, winter squashes that have been stored. They're starting to run out or sprout or rot. And then the new things, the beautiful green things that we started growing this year haven't yet come into season.

So we've been mentioning that idea here on the podcast for the last two months, but in May, although it's the hungriest end of the stored foods, we are starting to get a little bit more hope. We're starting to get some of the new season's crops and a lot of it is very, very green, which is quite nice. I'm gonna run through the fairly short list of things that are in season in May, starting with the UK.

First on the list for UK grown crops is asparagus. Asparagus really does have a very short season and that's because those little spears that we eat are actually the beginning of the shoot of the plant. So during the winter, the plant dies right back down and the soil is completely bare. And then those shoots come up through the bare soil like these weird little alien fingers.

And that's what we cut those beginnings of the shoots. But obviously if we kept cutting those all through the year the plant wouldn't be able to put any energy back into the plant for next year and they would just be a one season crop. However, asparagus plants will actually last about 20 years if you look after them. So we have to do is cut some of them for us at the beginning of the season and then allow the end ones to grow up and protect the plant for next year. So after we've cut the shoots for about six weeks, we then allow them to grow up and then they become about six feet tall, these weird, ferny things. So then they can photosynthesise enough energy to put back down into the crown of the plant which lives in the soil for next year. And that's how you get next year's crop. If you do an internet search on a picture of an asparagus plant, you'll be amazed at how tall it gets.

So for that reason asparagus is really only in season from when it first starts sprouting, which is really sort of April-ish until the middle of June when we start letting it grow. June the 21st is actually the day when we've traditionally stopped cutting it. There's just been this traditional date. After that, most people don't cut their asparagus. So it really is quite a short season and it's best to get hold of it now while it's not as phenomenally expensive as it will be out of So that's asparagus.

Next is broad beans. Broad beans are just coming into season now, they'll be around more towards the end of the month. They can be quite a hard sell for children because they're quite a pithy kind of bean and a lot of children don't like pithy beans. However, there's two things that I can say that might help. One is that even if your child won't eat them, you can build their familiarity with them by getting them to pod them. You can usually buy them in the shop still in their pods. And what's quite fun about broad beans is that when you open them up, there's usually three or four beans in each one. They're usually in this kind of lining that's really fluffy and it's a bit like a fluffy bed. And a lot of children really respond to that. You can talk about the beans having grown up in their fluffy bed or being put to bed in their pod. And you can get them to build up their familiarity just by podding the seeds out, even if they don't end up eating them. And if you want a good chance of getting them to eat them, you can also do a thing called double podding, which is when you remove that outer white skin.

So if you haven't done this before, if you put fresh broad beans into boiling water for a couple of minutes and then cool them down, you can then peel that white skin off. And inside is a bright green, really bright green, smaller bean. And that green bit in the middle is an easier texture because it's a single texture rather than dealing with the squeakiness of the skin plus the pithiness in the middle. And a lot of children can cope with that green bean in the middle, especially if they like peas. It's a not dissimilar taste and texture to peas. And it's often that outer white shell that a lot of people don't like, including some adults. So that's a good way to try them and you can, when you've double-podded them like that, you can kind of mash them and make a lovely sort of hummus-y type texture. It's a little bit like an avocado mash or a lot of people mix it in with avocado. So mashing it up on its own with a bit of lemon juice, with some yoghurt or with some avocado and then piling on toast is a really nice way to try them. But broad beans are so fun to pod that I think just podding them and having a go at them is good at this time of year.

Next up is carrots. The short stump baby varieties are just coming into season. The longer traditional ones need a lot longer, but you can get some of the little stumpy ones, which are great for lunch boxes.

Next up is elderflower. The flowers are on the trees during May, so if you live near one, you could gather some and Google a recipe and make some cordial. But also if you live near somewhere that has a farm stand or a fundraiser, you'll often find elderflower cordial or jam or jelly at this time of year. And that's from the flowers rather than the berries.

In May, horseradish is also coming into season. Now, I'm not really proposing that as an everyday children's food, but some children really like strong taste or spicy taste and some children don't mind occasionally experimenting with a strong taste just for fun, especially if they feel free to not like it, to drink some water, to squeal about how weird it is or how hot it is, in which case horseradish is a very fun one, it's very spicy and you only need a teeny tiny bit. In fact actually quite a lot of stuff that is sold as wasabi is actually horseradish but if you wanted to have a bit of an experiment with some fresh horseradish the roots are around at this time of year.

Then new potatoes are also coming into season. It's the peak months for the very early Jersey potatoes that we talked about last month and the very, very early regular new potatoes will start towards the middle or end of May. as usual with first early potatoes, it's good to leave the skins on not only because they have more fibre in them, because they've got that lovely taste of the early season earth and they're quite thin skin, so they're dead easy to eat.

Then next we're on to lettuces and early salad leaves. That's the new season stuff that's been sown in March. It's all six or eight weeks old now and it's ready to pick. So if your child doesn't really like salad, but you want to have a go with it, then a really good way to explore lettuce is to pick two different types of leaf. You know, say you get a little gem or an iceberg, something that's more familiar to them from burger buns, and then compare it with something very different, like one of the red crinkly ones or something like rocket, which is also in season and quite peppery. And then get them to compare them and tell you what they think, because then they're not trying to decide whether they like it or not. They're just saying which one they prefer out of the two and trying to describe how they taste.

On my website I've got a list of adjectives for food that children can use so I'll link to that in the show notes but that's quite a good way to get them describing food.

And then another way to get children to try lettuce is by having two dips. So if you have something they like, like a mayonnaise-based dressing or a ranch, and then something a bit different, like a French dressing, take a single variety of salad leaf, so maybe your little gem pieces, and they can dip that same type of leaf into both dips and then talk about what the dips are like. If you use a dip that you know they like alongside one that you're not sure about, then while they're discussing the dips, they are at the same time eating some lettuce and becoming more familiar with the lettuce but their focus will be on the dips. They'll think that that's what they're comparing and the lettuce is just a byproduct. So that's a cute way that you can get children to try salad if they don't really like having salad on their plate.

Okay now for one of my favourite spring foods which is new season peas. They're so much fun shelling peas and if you've ever shelled peas straight from the garden they're really sweet and very fresh tasting. So if towards the middle or the end of the month you get the opportunity to go into someone's garden who grows some peas and get your children to pick some. That's a really good place to try them because they can shell them and try them just raw standing there in the garden and they taste fantastic. If you haven't got access to anybody growing peas, then you will start to see more of them in their pods in the supermarkets at better prices coming up in the next few weeks. But don't forget that frozen peas are frozen on the day of picking and they're brilliant all year round.

May really marks the end of a couple of the very late winter crops, so purple sprouting broccoli, you might just about find it at some farmers markets or local greengrocers, but it'll start to not be in the shops now and the same goes for last season's leeks. Radishes are coming into season full on now, they're another one like salads where they only take about six weeks to grow from seed, so they're available pretty much everywhere.

And last month we had the beginnings of spinach under glass, but now the new season outdoor spinach is coming in. Spinach grows best when it's warm, but not too hot. So before and after the main part of the summer is the best time to buy locally grown spinach. Again, some children will eat spinach perfectly happily, some won't, but even if they don't want to try it, children can build their familiarity by having fun watching how a huge bag of spinach disappears down to nothing. So the next time you're cooking some spinach, Get your child to watch or join in so they can pile these mountains and mountains of leaves onto the pan and see how they end up being these tiny little strings. That's a really good way to build their familiarity up.

And then finally on the UK grown crops, spring onions are another one that only take a few weeks to grow. So the first lots of spring onions have been available in the last few weeks. They're quite a good one to get children to snip with scissors. They can snip them into cream cheese or into a dressing or on top of a salad. It's quite a nice little job for them to do, even if they're not that keen on onions and it helps with their manual skills. So that's the UK grown foods.

And now for a few foods that are imported but at their seasonal best right now. Bananas and plantain as usual are basically in season all year round because of the way that they're grown.

So you can still have your bananas in your lunchbox and your plantain on your dinner table as usual. You can also buy pineapple pretty much all year round because of the way that it's stored. However, their peak fresh season is sort of March to July-ish, so we're right in the middle of that now. And then finally, the first of the watermelons are coming out now. They'll be a little bit smaller and probably a bit more expensive because it's the beginning of the season, but you will start to get this season's juicy watermelons coming through.

So that's the May round up of seasonal food. And despite the shortlist, there's lots of green and hopeful foods, lots to look forward to. And by the end of this month, we'll have stopped having most of the frost in the UK, so there'll be a lot more foods coming through.

I hope this episode's given you some ideas of what to pick up in your next shopping trip and see if your child can pick out a couple of these things to find in the shops and that will also help 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 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 cooking with some of these May foods, but I'll be back with another non-seasonal related episode in between, so I hope I'll see you then. And in the meantime, happy eating.

00:00 Introduction

01:40 UK grown May seasonal foods

09:57 Imported May seasonal foods

10:36 Summary and outro