I’m sure it is - but “panettone” is one of the foods that is prepared for a specific holiday that the OP excluded.
Has she ever made a rhubarb/cherry pie? Mrs. Mercotan makes an absolutely delicious one, when I can persuade her to do so. Also rhubarb/strawberry and standard rhubarb pie. Plus a mean rhubarb salsa. However she will only make them with rhubarb from our own patch.
Strawberries aren’t hit or miss in strawberry season. If you buy the expensive local strawberries, they will taste like strawberry. (I live in the northeast, where the local strawberry crop is all decent strawberries.)
Vidalia onions. Maybe they’re available in other states year round but not in MN. They’re my husbands favorite onion to put on sandwiches, burgers, dogs. We can only get them Sept-Oct. Maybe the end of August.
I asked her about making pies with rhubarb mixed with other fruits like strawberries. She said that such recipes were for wimps who can’t handle rhubarb alone.
Seems a bit harsh. 
I’ve said exactly this to my gf.
I always get a kick out of folk who extol delicious rhubarb+something tasty recipes. SURE, you can make something nasty palatable if you combine it with enough of something that actually TASTES GOOD!
Am I the only one who’s never had rhubarb pie? A couple of years ago, it was being sold at a local independent grocery store around the holidays and I was tempted to buy it.
If you are a fan of sour fruits, I recommend you try it. Plain rhubarb pie is a treat.
If she’s that hardcore, does she make her rhubarb pie without added sugar? Yumm!
I do not add sugar to stewed rhubarb or rhubarb pie. I also never add any sugar to my applesauce. In fact I toss the apples in some lemon juice, then right into the crock pot.
Was mincemeat mentioned? Because I have two friends who say they can’t find it in the grocery stores. It’s a wintertime thing, and an acquired taste in baked goods.
It’s one of many ways to add acid to foods that otherwise lack acid. Like strawberries, which have a nice flavor, but would make a bland and unappealing fruit pie. I usually use lemon juice for sweets (because i always have it around) but rhubarb adds a nice flavor as well as being acid. Personally, i don’t care for the texture, though. But i sometimes make rhubarb dishes for my husband, and they taste very good.
Definitely cranberries. I just went to every food store in town, and they are all sold out, and won’t get any more until next year. This is a problem, because i need cranberries for my goose stuffing I’m making for tonight, and my husband has eaten most of our supply.
We have some frozen ones. Maybe they will be okay.
I’m pretty mad at my husband. He knows i need a bag for the stuffing, and he knows they aren’t usually available by now. I guess i can’t trust him. Next year maybe I’ll mark a bag, “for stuffing” and hide it.
Anytime I buy fresh cranberries, I put them directly in the freezer, because sometimes I’ve forgotten about them and then had to throw them out. Being frozen doesn’t bother them too much.
The only problem is sometimes I forget that I already bought some, and only remember when I put the new purchase in the freezer.
I ran into this just before Christmas. My wife sent me to the grocery store, to pick up some ingredients for a couple of dishes she was making for the Christmas gathering with her family, and wanted a bag of fresh cranberries for the dessert she was planning. None to be had, so after a text conversation, I got two cans of whole cranberries.
After I got back home with the groceries, she had discovered that she still had a bag of cranberries in the freezer, left over from Thanksgiving.
I did put a few bags on the freezer. Maybe those will be fine for stuffing. They can’t be used for muffins or other seasonal cranberry treats, as they are either too cold or too wet to work properly.
I’m a little worried about the food safety of using stuffing that’s not piping hot. There are a bunch defrosting in the kitchen now. They look soggy to me. Maybe that’s my imagination.
Sardines. The season varies depending where exactly you are, but on the Normandy/Brittany coast it’s mid-summer into the fall. So, better to holiday there in September rather than May (though ideally, do both).
And a very British offering: Seville Oranges (aka Marmalade Oranges). One to two weeks in early/mid January, and that’s it. I’m already feeling tense.
I immediately thought of this: “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit”
Good on you.
j
When I was stationed in Germany a few decades ago the one thing that stood out was spargel. Spargel is white asparagus. It has a very specific season in the spring. Restaurants hang signs saying they have a special spargel menu (Spargelkarte). June comes along and the signs come down. You won’t be able to find any until next year.
Here in Upstate NY in the spring there are a couple of restaurants that feature deep-fried catfish - bullheads - that are fished from nearby lakes. They are bony and scrumptious, only available for a couple of weeks. When the lakes warm up with warmer weather, they get a muddy taste, so they are seasonal.