I’ve been getting about 10 courgettes per week from our allotment which is too much to know what to do with, we’ve had courgette lasagne, courgette fritters, courgettes with lemon juice and olive oil, courgette cake (very nice!) and we’ve been giving them away to as many people as can take them too! Yesterday I got an email from the BBC - Dig In site, which I’d definitely recommend you sign up to (they give you free seeds!), with a recipe for courgette and gruyere muffins.
I fancy myself as a bit of a chef so I had a go and here is a picture of the result, they are very nice with some freshly picked tomatoes also from the allotment.
Here is a dilemma I’ve been having… One of my pledges for 10:10 is that I will stop buying fruit and vegetables from far flung places and buy local. Did you know that 1 basket full of imported food creates more carbon than an average family’s cooking for 6 months? And it takes 60 times more energy to get a Californian lettuce to your house than the energy you get from eating it!??
However, it’s not as simple as just buying tomatoes from Yorkshire when my plants aren’t producing fruit in the early/end of the season or during winter. Here’s why – UK grown tomatoes are often grown in heated greenhouses which obviously uses energy and emits lots of CO2 that could even out the emissions saved by them not coming from say Spain or Egypt.
I think the answer is to eat seasonally, afterall it’s what our Grandparents did! They probably had the right idea about lots of things: they used paper packaging and certainly didn’t waste as much stuff as we do. I think we could learn just as much from glancing back a couple of generations as we can from developments in the scientific world.
What's your view on eating seasonally? Do you have any advice? Comments, as always, are welcomed!
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