Co-op Shares and the Salad Blues

Once again I got a double share from the co-op, and split a case of strawberries.  We also volunteered and I traded a bag of apples for another box of mushrooms just cause we still had apples from last week.  We also got the bread variety pack.
This week's inventory:
4 boxes of strawberries
1 bag of apples +2 extras
2.5 bunches of Spinach (It was 3, but half of one was used for our Saturday morning breakfast with friends before coming home)
2 heads of lettuce
9 tomatoes (was 10, but we used one for breakfast)
2 cucumber
4 zucchini
4 boxes of mushrooms
2.5 boxes of blackberries (was 3, but the girl child munched on them on the way home)
5 avacados
11 bananas
10 oranges
10 peppers
Leftover from previous weeks:
1.5 boxes of strawberries
3 heads of romaine lettuce
1 head of butter lettuce
3 bunches of celery
8 tangelos
6 apples
13 mandarin oranges
1 sweet potato
onions (I actually went to the store last week for a bag of onion since I cook with them so much)
4 potatoes
2 partial boxes of grape tomatoes
several small sweet peppers

Breakfast with friends consisted of scrambled eggs, sauteed spinach and onion, sliced tomato, fresh strawberries and apples.

Lunch was sandwiches and fruit and those veggie straw chips.  Sort of a fend for yourself.  I think the only I did that might have counted as fixing a meal for the family was cutting the hoagie rolls and slicing a tomato and washing some lettuce.  This was our junk food meal, as my husband put it.

Dinner was the usual layered salad that has become my "how many veggies can I put in this thing" salad and a baked potato with sauteed veggies.  The salad had 2 kinds of lettuce, onion, celery, 2 colors of sweet peppers, cucumber, mushroom, grape tomatoes, frozen peas, frozen corn, Whole Food's 365 mayo and fresh ground black pepper.  The potato topping consisted of both the small red and yellow sweet peppers from last week as well as one of the larger green peppers from this week, zucchini, mushroom and onion.

Last week we had lots of pasta and home made pizza.  I felt sluggish from it.  Of course the layered salads are rather fatty, but there is still no cheese or meat in our diet.  While I think we might still be eating less fat than the average American, I feel like I need to do something to improve the health of our diets.  I think we eat healthier when we are getting more Kale, which I can steam, than lettuce, which I consume with fatty stuff like mayo or on sandwiches. But my weight loss has stalled, which I suspect is from the annoying salad theme going on with the co-op this month.  I just don't do healthy salads.  I need cheese or a creamy dressing to make them edible, and I can't eat cheese anymore. 

I think that next week I might have to order just one basket of produce and figure out what to do with all this lettuce and celery that is filling up my fridge.

Catching up

I feel sort of bad for not keeping up with my menu plans, but things had gotten sort of boring.  But I think I have figured out how to at least make some minor changes to keep the food interesting.
So going back to Saturday's co-op haul  We just got a double share this time.  This week included:
3 boxes of strawberries
2 boxes of mushrooms
2 boxes of grape tomatoes
2 bunches of celery
2 bunches of Asparagus
3 heads of romaine lettuce
4 zucchini
16 apples
25 tangelos
16 bananas
3 pints of sweet peppers

I still had left over from previous weeks:
broccoli
asparagus
2 bunches of celery
2 zucchini
1 leafy green lettuce
1.5 live butter lettuce
pineapple already cut
a few potatoes
And that single sweet potato (thank goodness those things keep so long)
Lots of oranges

Saturday was eating leftovers of chili beans and potatoes.
Sunday it was our turn to contribute to the church potluck.  I decided this was a good change to use up some of the lettuce and make layered salads, and also took lots of fruit.
I actually made 2 slightly different layered salads, although they look alike here.
They both have
3 kids of lettuce, onion (went to the store for that), celery,  broccoli, mayo, quartered grape tomatoes and fresh ground pepper.  The difference is that one has frozen peas and the other has frozen corn and some chopped sweet peppers.

Monday night consisted of some Asparagus roasted with onion and mushrooms tossed in olive oil and salt before cooking and served over a pasta that had been tossed in olive oil and nutritional yeast with strawberries on the side.  I think I like this even better than the garlic roasted asparagus that we have been having often.

Lunches have been fairly simple things.  Hummus in chips, peanut butter on celery (I do have 4 bunches of celery that needs eating), and today is a beautiful smoothie made with bananas, pineapple, strawberries and just a handful of frozen berries to chill it.

We are going through the veggies very quickly this week, and I doubt we will have any to eat on Friday, other than lettuce and celery.  But the fruit we have in abundance.  I think I might freeze any bananas we still have left tomorrow evening.  It is getting warm enough for regular smoothies again and frozen bananas are great for that.  And the husband is happy to have frozen bananas for making banana bread.

An abundance of co-op share

This week's co-op consisted of a basic share, a hostess pack and I shared a case of strawberries with a friend and bought more bread.  I really need to do something about how much bread the kids are eating around here.

So I ended up with
6 clam shells of strawberries (4 from the shared case 2 from the hostess pack)
7 russet potatoes
8 apples
7 bananas
1 onion
1 bag of red potatoes
2 bags of mandarin oranges
1 clam shell of grape tomatoes
2 lemons
3 avacados
1 pineapple
8 roma tomatoes
2 bags of raddishes
1 leafy green lettuce
1 bunch of asparagus
6 cucumbers
2 bunches of celery
dill
rosemary
3 loaves of 9 grain bread
1 baguette
1 hot cross bun bread (sweet bread with dried fruit)

Let over from before"
4 russet potatoes
1 sweet potato
1 onion
celery
2 heads of butter lettuce
beet
Several lemons
grapefruit
oranges
apples
key limes

I took the radishes and 3 of the cucumbers to our Sunday game night to share with some hummus as well as a package of field roast sausage. Yummy sausage.

My husband was sweet and made us a cake for Easter.  It was a basic yellow cake, but he made a glaze that used a lemon, a lime and half a clam shell of strawberries and lots of sugar.  It was very good.

The sweet bread once again made up a quick breakfast before church.  Lunch was eaten out because we had a lot to do for Easter Sunday since we wanted to go visit my grandfather for a bit.

A dinner of Ooops, It's lunch.

Dinner was to be this lovely steamed Kale over a mix of brown and wild rice and a side of the blended veggie soup.  But silly me, was rushing out the door for the girl child's Krav Maga lessons and hit the keep warm button instead of the brown rice button on my rice cooker.

The mistake was noticed before I arrived home, by my darling husband.  But as he worked late, he did not arrive home early enough to fix it in time for dinner to actually be prepared in a timely fashion.  So we ate at Taco Bell - yeah bean burritos, no cheese?  Then packed the kale and rice for lunches.

The kale was cooked in the steam basket above the rice in the rice cooker with some crushed garlic cloves and some sea salt.  A nice easy meal, provided you actually push the right button.

A Somewhat Healthy Lunch

Lunch today is not leftovers, mainly because the soup I have leftover is actually on my meal plan as part of dinner tonight, and I was craving hummus.
Lunch is a roasted red pepper hummus sandwich with butter lettuce on toasted 9 grain bread from the co-op and an orange.  If I am still hungry afterwards I might make a dessert out of an apple and some peanut butter.
I am not sure if you have noticed that I keep my meals pretty simple.  The easier they are to fix, the less likely we are to eat out.  That is the bane that we really fight against.  That thing that kills our budget and our health.
The food still needs to be tasty, and needs to have variety to keep us from being too bored with it to also eliminate the temptation to eat out.  The co-op helps with that, since I have to figure out how to make meals from what they give me and it prevents me from getting in a rut of  buying the same produce over and over again.  What I buy outside the co-op is the same foods over and over.  I get my long grain brown rice, my frozen corn, my frozen peas, canned oragnic tomato products, hummus, Jif natural peanut butter (crunchy for me, creamy for the husband, the kids eat either), pasta ect.  Only rarely will I get something unusual, and that is usually something we probably would do better to forgo anyway.  With the co-op we are getting variety, and it is a healthy variety.  Food allergies make it all the more complicated with variety.  Not just our allergies, but those of close friends too.

Sunday - Breakfast, Lunch, Game Night

For breakfast we had had the sweet bread that came in our bread pack from the co-op, a fried egg and half an orange.  It was probably not our healthiest breakfast to date, but it was very yummy.  The bread had lots of dried fruits in it and was very good.

Lunch was yet more of the salad left over from Friday.  Finally finished it off though.  I might have made a bit too much of it.  But goodness we are getting a lot of lettuce from the co-op these days.  We are really not salad people.  Other ways of eating lettuce just doesn't use that much of it.  We are more prone to use it on sandwiches, as lettuce wraps and such.  I just can't figure out what to do with so much lettuce, but make salad.
We had the veg soup I made for Saturday, that we didn't get home to have, with it. The husband blended it in the Vitamix and we topped it with a bit of Field Roast vegan apple sage sausage.

Dinner was our game night at friends.  It will be last one for a couple of weeks.  But we made lemon pudding. by using a teaspoon of lemon extract instead of a half teaspoon of vanilla and then I layered some lemon slices on top.  I think next time I will add some lemon zest to it to add a bit more zing.  Maybe try a different starch.  The flour is not as effective with the almond milk as the corn starch is, and we avoid the corn starch when visiting this house hold.  So my pudding wasn't as thick as I would have liked.  The husband made walnut meringue cookies with the egg whites leftover from the pudding making.
We also took our usual hummus and a couple of the cucumbers to dip in it. 

Co-op again - Sort of like a mini Christmas every week

Yeah!  I love my co-op day.  We volunteered again,in the rain, then went to have breakfast with a friend.  We brought the eggs and used an onion and spinach from our co-op shares as well.  They provided the potatoes and tortillas. 

This pile of food represents a basic basket, a juice pack and bread pack.  We were also supposed to have a Hostess pack with more food geared towards entertaining for the Easter Holiday, but there was a bit of a mix up with the delivery and we decided to be nice and be the ones to go without.  Mainly because we are not really expecting any company for Easter and we just wanted the variety of produce.  Then after we ordered the boy was asked to house sit for some friends, which means he will be gone for most of the week. 

As I mentioned before getting home we used an onion and a bunch of spinach that was in the juice pack.  But we have:


3 bunches of asparagus
kale
broccoli
2 pineapple
3 cucumber (got extra cucumber from the friend we had breakfast with as they don't eat it)
1 beet
1 carrot
4 potatoes
1 butter lettuce
parsley
celery
onion
8 key limes
8 oranges
ginger
3 grapefruit
5 bananas
lemon
3 apples
1 loaf of hot cross bun bread (not sure what it is, but seems to be a sweet bread)
1 baguette
3 9 grain bread loaves

I still have from last week
2 heads of butter lettuce
2/3 of a head of cauliflower
5 lemons
7 apples
4 oranges
1 grapefruit
1 onion
3 garlic
1 banana
some celery

Not sure about the interviewer, but the birds like the girl child

Lunch today was leftover salad and home made bread from last night.  My daughter had an interview at the Zoo for a volunteer position, so we headed out on the train right after lunch and ended up at Spaghetti Warehouse for dinner.  I felt sort of bad that we were out so late, because I had made a soup in the crock pot for dinner, but it will be lunch for tomorrow.
Before I forget what I put in it:
2 potatoes
the carrot
last week's celery
fresh parsley
fresh basil (grow this myself)
half an onion
last week's 2/3 head of cauliflower
half a bulb of garlic, cloved peeled and put in whole
a carton of Trader joes Hearty Vegetable Broth
Water to cover

I think I will blend it and maybe crumble some vegan sausage over it for lunch tomorrow.