Delirity

Our local farm share started up this past week. For 24 weeks this year, we’ll be loaded up with fresh veggies and 2 dozen free range eggs. Fruit and honey will be coming from the local farmer’s market on Saturdays. I’m hoping that this means we can decrease our grocery store trips to every 2 weeks or so (for meat and bananas and whatever other random essentials we need).

We’re really hoping that embracing our farm share will help us to clean up our eating (there’s been just a little too much sugar involved recently!). When we did this 2 years ago we frequently had food that we never got to. Our goal this year is to consume everything (except fava beans)… we’ve learned a lot in the past 2 years and have a plan of attack:

1. I “process” all the fresh food immediately upon getting home. This goes something like: empty produce from awesome organic cotton bags, wash with veggie wash and filtered water, and put into the many vented containers we have. That means it’s really easy to eat stuff when we want it.
2. Anything we have a large quantity gets made into smoothies made by the vitamix we received last year for Christmas. This should really help with the huge amounts of greens we get – particularly during the first half of the season!

This week’s share (“small” since it’s the first week) contains mixed lettuces, spinach, mild mustard greens, pea greens, kale, radishes, chives, and a cherry tomato plant (which I’m attempting to grow on our back patio in a pot – cross your fingers for enough sun!). Since Jesse is out of town this week, it’s up to me to eat it all! So far I’m actually making fairly good progress on it. I’ve been making smoothies (with lots of greens mixed in!) and kale crispies (in fact, all the kale is gone now!). And, the radishes are actually mild enough to eat like a carrot!

We’re gonna be so healthy

Everyone makes fun of me every year…  but I love having BLTs and brownies for my birthday. It’s better than just about anything I can get at a restaurant. I was a little worried about this when we stopped eating gluten… but thanks to Angeline’s Gluten Free Bread and Trader Joe’s gluten free brownies (or this year we’ll be having an amazing brownie-like treat from Bellingham’s Co-Op), my birthday meal isn’t threatened at all by my gluten-free lifestyle!

My husband loves me so much he’s even ok with the fact that I very well may have a BLT for breakfast, lunch and dinner today! Thank you for humoring me honey

Today I made a pumpkin pie to take to Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow over at the in-laws. While I was going through my spices I was dreaming of the day when I can organize them nicely and have them in matching containers. Of course, that led me to looking online for good ideas. I was thinking that finding containers that actually fit in a drawer would be nice… and then I found this (click the picture to link to the full description and how-to):

I may just have to start buying up these containers now… they’ll fit on my shelves or in a drawer… and then someday when I have a home that has some sort of pantry I’ll really be able to get things set up.

This is perfect too because I love buying my spices in bulk. I’ve bought a lot of them from Winco and New Seasons (and Fred Meyer), but in my tour de spice on the internet today I discovered Penzeys Spices and realized that I could really do with some refills of spices that are harder to come by (like smoked paprika for the most awesome soup ever).

I’ve been completely spoiled by our CSA. They provide us with pretty much all the veggies that we eat. The rest of the food we eat comes primarily from New Seasons where we’re able to get local free range beef and lamb (and some occasional fowl or pork) and wild-caught Northwest seafood, plus organic/local fruit and any bulk beans/rice/cereal we might need. I love that I’m able to get such local, fresh groceries. 

Today I went into Winco (a Northwest grocery store that is employee-owned!) to get some spices (they sell them at incredible prices in bulk) and I felt overwhelmed. I used to go there once a week, but now I mainly go when I need to buy spices or nuts in bulk or bananas. I like the store because being employee-owned and Northwest operated makes me happy, but it’s sort of like the WalMart of grocery stores – it’s all about the low price, not necessarily the quality – and the tall aisles are getting more intimidating to me than they used to be.

A few weeks ago, Jesse and I finally headed down to the Bob’s Red Mill store in area. That’s right, Bob’s Red Mill is in Portland (well, Milwaukie actually). It was awesome. It made me dream of buying enormous bags of gluten free oats (which they’re currently out of). For now I settled on trying some of their gluten-free pizza crust mix – that may actually be what’s for dinner tomorrow!

I love that we have reasonably priced local grocery options here in the Portland area. New Seasons may be similar (but better!) to Wild Oats, but I believe they do a better job of sticking to local items and they’re cheaper. Have I mentioned that in addition to buying local, I love to buy in bulk?  It’s the best – cheaper and it helps save on packaging materials and trips to the store. Is it weird that I enjoy grocery shopping so much?

Jesse is in the first few days of a 2-3 week cleanse – that means it falls on me to eat everything we get from the farm. I’m working on making my use of the veggies more efficient. On Thursday night I threw together some delicious fresh fingerling potatoes with fresh scallions, garlic and dill. Yummmm.

Tonight I worked on making it easier for me to eat all the fresh lettuce we’ve got (holy goodness there’s a lot!). I’ve got 3 containers ready for lunches this week and I’ve got everything else washed, torn into manageable sizes and stored in a nice container. There’s no way I could ever get this variety in a store, but it’s still hard to deal with soooo much lettuce!

Even though I’m doing good with managing what’s in the refridgerator right now, tomorrow night is farm pick up again, so I’ll have even more yummy fresh veggies to contend with! I’m going to have to be very diligent with my vegetable eating for the next few weeks to get it all in (especially considering that there haven’t been too many weeks where between the two of us we’ve eaten it all!). Wish me luck!