September Produce Guide
Hello September and welcome to month 9 of our Monthly Seasonal Produce Guides!
We’ve all heard the advice to eat foods with color from the rainbow, right? Well you can’t beat September for rainbow foods. We have all the colors here!
If you didn’t fill up on tomatoes in August, you have one more month to enjoy seasonal fresh tomatoes of all kinds — heirloom, cherry tomatoes, romas. You’ll also still find plenty of cucumbers, summer squash, and stone fruit. Eggplants and green beans are peaking in early September.
Apples are the fruit that define September for me. Have you made plans to go apple picking yet? You’ll also find a bounty of figs and grapes.
For those of you who love Southwestern flavors, September is the month for green chiles of all sorts — Hatch and Anaheim green chiles, perfect-for-stuffing poblanos, and jalapeños.
Timed perfectly to ripen alongside the chiles are husk covered tomatillos, what you need for making salsa verde.
What’s in season in September?
- Apples — Time for applesauce and apple pie! Look for Jonagold, Braeburn, Fuji, yellow Golden Delicious, and tart green Granny Smith.
- Tomatoes, including green tomatoes — if you’re a gardener, make sure to pick all of your tomatoes before the first freeze. You can make fried green tomatoes with any unripe green tomatoes, or just leave them on the counter to ripen. They will eventually turn red.
- Grapes — Fill out the colors of the rainbow with different varieties of seedless table grapes. Or if you happen to have grapevines, make your own homemade grape juice!
- Green Beans — Look for crisp string beans and wax beans that snap when you bend them, thin and tender French haricots verts, and flat bright green Romano beans
- Figs — Rarely to figs make it to a recipe in our house, we love eating them straight! But if you have either lots of figs or lots of self control, try this fig jam, it’s the jam.
- Eggplant — Pick up globe eggplants for baba ganoush and eggplant parmesan, or tender Japanese eggplants for a ginger miso stir-fry.
- Chilies — Buy a bagful of Hatch green chiles or Anaheims and roast them until they are black all over. If you freeze them this way, the blackened bits will just slip off like silk when you defrost them.
- Tomatillos — Tomatillos may look like green tomatoes in husks, but they are just remotely related. Use tomatillos for Mexican salsa verde.
Scroll down for more recipe ideas. What are your favorite dishes to make with late summer fruits and vegetables?
