Seasonal Vegetables to Eat this Winter

Want to eat more seasonal winter vegetables? Here’s our guide to cooking and eating local in-season veggies in fall and winter.

Seasonal vegetables are the unsung heroes of winter eating. It may surprise you just how many winter veggies are available fresh. If you add in root vegetables, which keep well in storage for several months, you have a wide range of eating and cooking choices for the cold weather season.

Which Vegetables are Fresh in Winter?

Fresh greens for salads and braising are available in BC throughout the winter months. These include hardy lettuce such as romaine, red leaf, and buttercrunch, as well as sprouts, baby spinach, beet greens, and bok choy. Spicy, earthy, sharp, or bitter greens such as arugula, tatsoi, mizuna, red mustard, radicchio, endive, frisée, and sorrel are also available fresh. Sharp greens are good in salads paired with a fruit-flavoured vinaigrette.

Hardy greens for side dishes, soups, slaws, and stir-fries include broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, collards, Brussels sprouts, kale, and chard. Cabbage and collards, with their large leaves, make delicious wraps.

Root vegetables for roasting, baking, or mashing include carrots, parsnips, beets, turnips, and rutabagas. Carrots are also excellent raw in salads and coleslaw.

Mushrooms for pastas, meat, and vegetarian main dishes come in several varieties, including white button, crimini, porcini, shiitake, oyster, and portabella.

Fresh winter herbs and alliums to add seasoning include leeks, scallions, bay leaves, cilantro, parsley, rosemary, thyme and winter savoury. Leeks make a tasty base for soup, quiche, and risotto, providing an interesting taste contrast to everyday onions.

Winter Vegetables from Storage

In addition to the fresh choices above, dried or stored winter vegetables, such as potatoes, provide a reliable supply of produce from crops harvested earlier in the year.

Winter stored vegetables include seasonings like garlic, onions and shallots, as well as winter squash, potatoes, and sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes). Winter squashes come in many varieties, from butternut, acorn, Hubbard, delicata, and spaghetti squash (for baking), to sugar pumpkins (for pie baking, sweet breads, and purees). Sunchokes, the versatile root of a plant in the sunflower family, can be boiled, roasted, fried, steamed, grilled or grated into savoury pancakes.

Recipes: Nine Vegetables to Eat in Winter

Here are nine of our favourite recipes for seasonal fall and winter vegetables. Try these winter vegetable salads, side dishes and snacks.

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