— Rose Hang

Now probably the most obvious way is to when if you go to a farmer's market, those are gonna be the vegetables that, and, um, ingredients you'll see most often are the ones that are going to be in season. If you're going to a grocery store, you'll typically see them right when you first walk into the produce section because they have the most abundance at the moment and they're also gonna be the most value for your buck. It is, uh, much cheaper to grow a tomato really close to your grocery store and get it there than, uh, grow it somewhere very far south, um, you know, in uh, a different country and then be able to get it up to, uh, your grocery store. So most often than not, you can actually just find in your grocery store kind of what's up front, what's in se, uh, and what would be in season, what's up front and what's on sale. There's usually going to be a lot of it as well. Beyond that, there are a lot of different guides out there that you can, uh, do a quick Google search on to find what se what is in season now, um, depending on where you are in the country or in on the world, to be able to find what is in season at the moment, um, to be able to utilize in your dishes. Now I'm a huge proponent of eating seasonal, uh, varieties of food, um, and eating them in season because you're gonna get the most bang for your buck, um, flavor wise, but also price wise. So, um, a tomato is probably the best example of this. If you think about what a tomato tastes like maybe at this time of year in September versus um, what it would taste like, uh, maybe in December, I'm talking in the US as well too, but that tomato in December doesn't really kind of taste like a tomato. It tastes more, you know, kind of like a watery, you know, it tastes more watery than it does tomato. Um, and then the tomato in September is gonna be full of flavor and you're gonna get a lot of ripeness to it. Um, it's kind of the way, uh, if you think about canned tomatoes, uh, the canned tomatoes are picked at the peak of ripeness. That's why so many, um, you know, Italian grandmothers use, uh, canned tomato, maybe the San Marzano or whatever, but they'll use the canned ones 'cause they know that they're picked at the right, the very peak of season. They can use 'em anytime they want to. Um, and they have the most flavor out of them. So if you are eating in season, um, try to use your guide basically to be able to find what is in there and then you can, uh, use, uh, those in whatever recipe you're looking, um, to utilize those into. Um, now there's such a huge variety I can't really give you, you know, like here's exactly what it is. But for like, right now, um, for example, uh, like I'm planning a picnic with my kids later today. So I took some garden, um, some garden fresh tomatoes and some basil from the backyard. Um, mixed it up with some shallots that I've been growing and some green onion and a little bit of garlic from earlier in the season. Um, chopped that all up and made it into something that I can put in a nice crusty bread as well. Um, mushrooms right now for me are, uh, kind of early se, or, well, it depends. Some of the mushrooms came out earlier, some of 'em are came coming out later. The chanterelles are really nice and the oyster mushrooms, but the shiitakes might've been a little bit earlier in my season as well too. So depending on where you are and what zone and climate zone you're in, you're gonna have different seasonality, vegetables, depending on what the time is and how you use them is really kind of a mix depending on what ingredients you get at the moment. That's actually one of my favorite parts of cooking is being able to mix and match ingredients, um, depending on what you have on hand.