Welcome to Eat Well Every Day

Welcome to Eat Well Every Day!

I've spent years researching nutritional information, food ideas and recipes, because cooking and eating - especially with family & friends - are some of life's great pleasures. And guess what- healthy food doesn't have to be boring! It can be exciting and delicious!

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Saturday, February 20, 2010

Local and Seasonal



A meditation on some ways of eating sustainably

While I've been buying fresh produce from my local farmer's market and trying to nurture some green vegetables and herbs on my tiny balcony, I’ve noticed an interesting trend on television and in the foodie magazines I sub-edit. It seems top of the line chefs have fallen in love not with only seasonal foods, but the gratification of growing and in some cases, breeding organic produce for themselves. Of course, if they run restaurants or bistros, they can’t produce enough for their commercial kitchens, but have to source local growers of the esoteric produce they’ve discovered.

Because not only are some of these chefs sudden converts to the joys of growing veggies and fruit – being food specialists they naturally fall for the rarer or old fashioned heritage produce.

This month I’ve subbed articles with gardening chefs extolling the joys of purple carrots, heirloom tomatoes in every shade from pale yellow to bright orange, beetroot that aren’t magenta in colour, but warm gold, or even a parsnip off-white. Except that cream-coloured parsnip is rather passĂ© – they also come in a range of hues similar to non-orange carrots.




Starting from Scratch

Paralleling this trend is the one where food lovers, who may or may not have a connection to commercial cooking, decide to start from scratch producing food the pre-industrial way. It may have started with Hugh Fearnley–Whittingstall and his delightful attempts to show ordinary English folk how to feed themselves sustainably and seasonally from tiny patches of waste land, hedgerows and local parks.

But he’s not alone – ex-UK marine Monty Halls, lived for six months on the West Coast of Scotland at Beachcomber Cottage, an old crofter’s cottage, where he grew vegetables for the first time and attempted to survive by hunting and fishing (and the odd cappuccino in the village cafĂ©).

In Australia, ex-Sydney restaurant critic Matthew Evans moved to Tasmania, to a small farm to plant vegetables, keep chickens, goats and a dairy cow, and generally enjoy the good life away from the city crowds and smog.

So what has this to do with the real world of sourcing and cooking healthy food, given that most of us can’t flee to a beautiful but relatively isolated spot and live for a year or so on our bank account while we reinvent agriculture? Some inner-city denizens may have one answer.

Continued on Limes and Seasons

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