The bounty of summer fruit continues to impress this week with peaches, nectarines, apricots, plums, pineapple, and mangoes all abundant at your local fruit and veg shops.
Customers are spoilt for choice with mangoes as all mango varieties are well supplied, including Kensington Pride, R2E2, and Honey Gold mangoes from Townsville, Bowen and Mareeba. All are great eating, as are Hass avocados from Western Australia and Cabarlah near Toowoomba. Combine them with butter lettuce, cooked tiger prawns, lime juice, and coriander for a taste of summer or a crowd-pleasing Christmas Day salad.
Both white and red seedless grapes from Emerald are coming into season and prices will stabilise subject to weather and supply over the coming weeks. Blueberries from the southern states are the pick of the berries, while the fig season is getting started and prices are looking to come down as supply improves. Apricots as well as white and yellow nectarines and peaches are all well-supplied.
Rockmelons and watermelons coming from Far North Queensland continue their excellent season and are available for a bargain if you’re trying to save some money leading into the festive season. These sub-tropical treats are great for juicing, smoothies, and snacks to help you beat the increasing heat and humidity.
Now is also a good time to stock up on limes, ideal for summer drinks, as we are seeing prices ease, however, Queensland new season lemons are pricier as supply is limited.
Queenslanders aren’t the only ones feeling the weather this week — many of our supplies coming from the southern states are suffering too following persistent rain and cooler weather. We’re seeing a limited supply of cherries, broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, snow peas and capsicum.
However, all is not lost in the vegetable lines as we are seeing good supply, quality and value of asparagus, cabbage, carrots, beetroot, sweet potatoes, brushed potatoes, cucumbers, and shallots.
With cabbage, shallots, beetroot and carrots in good supply, this is a great week for making coleslaw. Well-priced cucumbers, iceberg and cos lettuces are other market favourites, so team them up in kid-friendly salads or get creative with dips like Greek tzatziki or Indian raita. Cherry tomatoes continue to offer great value and mushrooms have also caught our eye this week, with good supplies of quality button mushrooms coming from Woodford and Swiss brown mushrooms arriving from South Australia.
This week’s top pick is Hass avocado, which is great quality and abundant stock arriving from Western Australia and from Cabarlah. To test for ripeness, gently press the top of the avocado; also look for a purplish black colour. Store unripe avocados at room temperature, or to speed up the process, place avocados in a brown paper bag with an apple or banana for two to three days. Up the ante on your avo on toast by adding roasted cherry tomatoes, fetta, and basil, or fried chorizo and poached egg.
Report supplied by Brismark