Lettuce can often start to bolt during a hot August, but it’s still wonderful to add to pretty much any meal. If you’ve got a surplus, or the selection in your fridge is past its best, blitz it and add potatoes, cucumber and fresh herbs for a cooling summer soup. If tomatoes are more your glut of choice, try something similar and cook up a gazpacho.

Raspberries are best enjoyed freshly picked from the plant, but you can also preserve them in a number of different ways. Try adding to the juice of lemons to create a cordial or lemonade, or whip up a raspberry vinegar to add to salads in the winter. Or just keep things simple, and freeze ready to make smoothies and desserts later in the year.

The season is short, but if you can get your hands on fresh sweetcorn, it’s a delight and makes such a simple supper dish when served with lashings of butter and slices of crusty bread. To make more of a dinner party dish, add a side of peeled courgettes fried up with lemon juice.

We're approaching the height of summer and at last gardens, allotments and fields are filled tempting produce. But what kind of things should you be eating if you want the best of the current crop?

Eating Seasonally - July

First up is beetroot. Not the pickled variety stacked in tall glass jars, but the earthy, pungent spheres pulled up directly from the soil or bought from a local farm shop; perfect chopped into chunks in a salad or roasted with other vegetables. Broad beans are still in season too, but eat them soon because as we get closer to August they become a little stringy. New potatoes are now in full swing - try them boiled and laced with butter and freshly-ground pepper for a truly fresh flavour. Finally the early season carrots are started to pop up; these work well in salads or boil them whole to go with a summery roast chicken dinner.

Check out the Eat Seasonably calendar for more advice on what to eat in July, or head over here for seasonal recipes.

What are you planning on cooking up this month?

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Hello lovelies, and happy Tuesday! So we're getting closer to the weekend and that means I'm starting to think about exciting dishes I can cook for Mr CC when I will actually have time in the kitchen. Those of you who have dropped by here before will know that Mr CC and I grow our own vegetables and try to eat what's in season each month; the reasons for this fall mainly into the taste category, but I do find that eating seasonally has economic advantages too - veg in season is so much cheaper than anything that has been exported.

So what should you be eating in June?

eating seasonally june

Lettuces, peas, broad beans and strawberries are the best of the bunch at this time of year. If you grow your own, peas and broad beans are often among the first produce to be ripe for the picking and it is such a delight to go from plant to plate in less than half an hour. Lettuce and strawberries are available year round but are so much fresher in the summer months, and June is the perfect moment to bottle up that strawberry goodness into jam if you have a glut (or your local farm shop is selling them cheaply).

The lovely folks over at Eat Seasonably have compiled a handy calendar should you want to investigate further.

The BBC (always a good port of call for recipes) also have a category dedicated to seasonal recipes - you can find those for June here.

What foods do you enjoy in June? Have you got any recipes that would fit for these foods?

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