Winter Veg

 

Last weekend, we walked up to the Fill Your Pantry event at the Benton County fairgrounds. The place was buzzing with people picking up preorders of beans, grains, and veggies, as well as adding to their pile while eating samples of winter foods.  We dodged a downpour and came home with about 30 pounds of dried beans (our winter stores) and a poster that tells us to Eat Our Winter Veggies! For the fridge.

We don’t really need to be exhorted to eat winter veggies, especially local ones…we have potatoes stored under the basement steps, squashes and onions in the larder, canned tomatoes and salsas on the shelf, and dried fruit in jars. I made a batch of sauerkraut from a huge head of cabbage last Tuesday evening; it is fermenting on the top of the refrigerator.  There are still leeks and parsnips in the garden, as well as some volunteer mustards.  We buy our greens and other veg from Sunbow every week.  We are ready.

 We eat our local winter veg  first because it tastes better than summer food driven  in from the other side of the world. A fresh head of kales and mustard is alive in a way that a pale winter tomato will never be. It is also better for our planet; we are not shipping what is essentially water  thousands of miles. And it supports the local economy. We know the people who have grown our food and we know where they are spending their money close to home.  There is also the challenge to menu planning from what is at hand and how that ties us to the seasons. We eat asparagus until it is done then wait for next year.  Broccoli and cauliflower come and go several  in the course of the year.  We eat zucchini until we are bored but embrace it very early summer when it comes around again.

So it is time to shift, again, to winter foods. There are beans  for soup in the crockpot.  New bread. Cauliflower waiting to be chopped and roasted for dinner this evening.  Winter veg.