Welcome to Veg of the Month: seasonal produce for nutritious and delicious January meals
Hello friends! How have your holidays been? If you’re anything like us you will have eaten and drunk to your heart’s content, and enjoyed some well deserved downtime with family, friends, games and movies. All this revelry and abandonment of normal routines create the perfect conditions to make us feel like we’re ready for change by January and the new year.
At DCS you’ll find the Christmas trees are down, and the festive classes replaced with brand new classes for 2022. But we’ve got to make a confession… we’re not that big on new years’ resolutions. While January is of course a good time to plan for the year ahead, and think about the direction you want to go in, we don’t think it calls for a complete personality overhaul. So although we’re shrugging off the excesses of the festive season, it’s not to embrace restriction or 30 days of salads (although if that’s what you want to do, you do you!). Instead we are returning to our regular ways of eating a rounded, colourful, intentional menu of home cooked foods.
Something we will be focusing on in the DCS kitchen this month is seasonal veg. Not just from a health perspective (counteracting all those Quality Streets!) but also from a sustainability perspective. More and more people are becoming interested in eating seasonally, and understanding where their food comes from.
Introducing our ‘Veg of the Month’ project
Every week in January we are picking a seasonal UK veg to celebrate. Over on our Instagram you’ll find a ‘veg fact’ post each week, and here on our blog you’ll find a delicious seasonal veg recipe to go with it.
We love food, and we’re big fans of trying to create delicious, nutritious and sustainable eating practices. Our cookery school was born from a love of understanding where food comes from, the work that goes into it, and appreciating that homemade food is naturally better for us - nutritionally and mentally. Learning to cook is not really seen as a national education priority, so many young people (and older) don’t have the privilege of proper food and cooking education. Many of us don’t even have the time to prepare homemade food. Our mission is to connect people with the essential practice and joy of cooking. To demystify delicious recipes, make complicated flavours easy to achieve, and help home cooking be the go-to option.
Ingredients from around the world naturally are a part of what we do - in fact we pride ourselves in our rota of international cookery classes - sharing the joy of flavours from across the globe. Our goal with ‘Veg of the Month’ is to introduce how we might make small decisions to reduce the ‘foodprint’ of our meals, maximise nutrition, and support local growers. Many international recipes can be made with local and even seasonal UK ingredients.
Eating seasonally means focusing on food that naturally grows in the UK at certain times of year. With modern farming, the growth and harvest periods of many foods has extended - but ‘seasonal’ means with minimal interference. We do take ‘seasonal’ to include foods that grow with a little help from grow tunnels or other low-impact infrastructure, but we focus on foods that thrive in certain seasons due to natural sunlight, water and soil nutrient levels.
What ‘seasonal’ definitely does