Seasonal Food

I have been thinking about what it means to eat seasonal food of late. Lots of food magazines, restaruarant reviews etc. pay homage to the idea of local seasonal produce, then, when you read the menu or list of ingredients there are things that could not possibly grow in the same season and location. As we are trying to grow most of our own food and the so called "fresh" food we have access to is of such poor quality, seaonal food is becoming our daily reality. It is a real challenge to me as like most people today I am used to eating whatever it is that I feel like eating. Example, the other day we needed some fruit and there is not much in the garden at the moment except the lemons and some out of season passionfruit that somehow decided to set fruit over the winter, so Peter bought some oranges. They look quite nice, in fact, two weeks later they still look nice, but they are inedible. They are still sitting in the kitchen as I cant decide what to do with them. There must be something.
To eat seaonal food here at the moment means we need to eat lots of lemons, a few passionfruit, rhubarb and now we are getting a few strawberries each day. We reckon our lemons taste better than the supermarket oranges anyway. I guess that list of ftuit would meet our fruit requirments in any case. The thing with the fruit is that you really look forward to each new crop starting and end up thinking what on earth can I do with yet another orange etc. If the berries continue to do well and we stay on top of the fruit fly and coddling moth we will have almost a years supply of fruit. Our mulberries are a few weeks off and then the apricots will start.
The thing that really got me thinking about seaonal food though was these cauliflowers. the brassicas have down pretty well this year and i have been remembering to pick them small and use them so as not to have a glut. However with Peter in hopsital they got away from me and I found three that urgently needed to be picked.

I originally thought I would freeze them, then remebered that last year we did not ever use the ones we froze because we always had seasonal vegetables on hand! they are not as nice in any case. So off to the recipe books and google recipes for cauliflower for some inspiration. The result a lovely cauliflowere salad, with a garlicky lemon and mustard dressing, mustard leaves and snow peas. Delicous and nutritous. It used two of the cauliflowers.

Other things that will be on the menu are pureed cauliflower, instead of mashed potato and cauliflower soup which I suspect would freeze well, cauliflower curry is nice as well. Now I just need more silverbeet ideas.