What's in season in February

February is a funny old month. It is the month that in the UK can bring some of the harshest winter weather, and I write this having travelled through a fair bit of snow to get to work today. People are usually getting sick of winter, but spring still seems a way off. That said, the days are definitely getting longer, and towards the end of the month we sometimes get the odd nice day that suggests that spring is maybe not so far away. It is a similar story in terms of seasonal ingredients, at the start of the month we're still looking at a lot of winter staples: roots and brassicas, and we wave goodbye to most game birds for another season, but towards the end of the month we start to see a few new things that hint of the approaching change of seasons.

I'm not the pheasant plucker, I'm the pheasant plucker's son...

Autumn brings with it an abundance of seasonal foodstuffs. One of my favourites is game. The game season starts with much hoohah on 12 August, the 'Glorious Twelfth', when the red grouse season opens. Restaurants fall over themselves to have grouse on their menus on the evening of the Twelfth, or at latest the 13th. (Given that grouse benefits from several days hanging, and that a huge premium is charged for these mid-August birds, I usually wait several weeks before indulging). The partridge and mallard season opens on 1 September, with pheasants and woodcock following on 1 October.