I have a friend who is all about eating the right foods in their season (she even co-authored a cookbook on seasonal cooking), so this time of year I hear a lot about farmers’ markets, CSAs and what to do with an abundance of lettuce (lettuce soup anyone?). To help figure out what is available in your area throughout the year Epicurious has developed a food by season mapping tool. Just click on your state and a list of seasonal ingredients appears. You can they hover over kohlrabi, for instance, and click on recipes using that ingredient or find out what the heck the particular vegetable is. Overall pretty nifty.
The obvious drawback, of course, is that a state might be quite geographically various (think Oregon, Alaska, Montana) so the ingredients might not actually be in season in your particular part of the state. And locations outside of the U.S. aren’t even included. You can also make yourself jealous about the food that is available in other locales (stinky Texans and their ripe blueberries…). But hopefully the map combined with the Epicurious recipes will have you well on your way to cooking and eating seasonally.
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well, this is pretty much the coolest thing ever–I was using epi yesterday and didn’t even notice it! Another trick, though it’s not as good at identifying *local* seasonal items, is to use the season/occasion option in the advanced search screen. I use it for menu planning pretty much every week.
And, yes I made lettuce soup once…actually it was pea soup with lettuce in it, but I couldn’t get it to blend in very well.
The map is hard to find from the epi home page. Even when I knew the URL and followed the path, it was still tricky. I definitely think they should be advertising it more from their homepage instead of burying it under a “more” type of link.