Welcome to the Bridge Cottage Kitchen & Seasonal Eating.

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Welcome to the Bridge Cottage Kitchen and our introduction to Seasonal Eating. 🙂

Welcome Bridge Cottage kitchen

In this section of the website, we will look at seasonal eating to help you understand when different fruit and vegetables are ripe and ready. It is offered as a complement to the page, The Bridge Cottage garden, where we hold your hand as you plant and grow your crops. We will offer tried and tested recipes to enjoy home-cooked food when it is at its best, fresh and locally produced.  We will also look at pickling and preserving to help your precious produce last into the winter months.

There is much food to be gathered from the hedgerows, foraged for free. We will discuss the ethics behind foraging, and how to gather food from the wild without impacting on wildlife.

Tomatoes ripening on the vine

Supermarkets with their year-round array of fruit and vegetables have taken seasonal eating out of many folks’ consciousness, and with it, the taste. I don’t want to eat tomatoes in January that have been ground under plastic in Almeria in Spain, neither do I want to eat asparagus that has come from Peru. I want to eat English asparagus in the small window that it is available in June, and will wait for my tomatoes to be ripe and ready before I eat them. I guarantee they will taste like a different vegetable to the one that has sat on the supermarket shelf, wrapped in plastic, after having been shipping halfway around the world.

homemade jam

Do you have memories of your grandparents pickling and preserving fruit and vegetables? Both my grandmothers made jam, one with a shelf in the fridge door of strawberry jam, and the other who filled tiny paste posts with homemade raspberry jam. Mine were from the wartime generation who had to learn to make the most of what they had, and I believe we need to take a leaf out of their books and go back to those days. I wrote over in the Sustainable Living section of this website about how the bubble had burst. I strongly believe we need to reduce our spending, reduce plastic waste, and for the sake of the planet, reduce our carbon footprints. If I can keep out of the supermarkets I will. Never has it been more important to try and grow and cook as much of our own food as we can, and eat seasonally.

Gooseberry and elderflower ice cream

Over the year we will be making jam, jellies and chutneys together, drying herbs and making herbal teas, freezing summer fruit, churning ice-cream and making out own cheese and yoghurt. When Christmas comes, we’ll look at ways to keep it simple and homemade. So get saving your jam jars, don’t throw any containers or bags away. You’ll be needing them for in the coming months.

As ever, we’d love you to share your thoughts, either by leaving a comment here or one our social media pages, where this article will be shared.

You can find the Bridge Cottage Way on Facebook Twitter and Instagram.

You might enjoy some of the writing and ideas in other section of this website, as we look towards leading more sustainable lives by growing our own food and creating dishes in line with seasonal eating, or head to our handy ‘Month by Month’ guides to find out what is seasonal and on topic:

• Sustainable Living
• The Bridge Cottage Garden
• Month by Month

Many thanks for reading.

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