Bountiful Baskets 4/7/2012

Today is Bountiful Baskets day! I've never blogged about them before but i've been talking about it on facebook a lot lately. Bountiful Baskets is a produce co-op where you pay a set price for every week you want to participate, and you get fresh fruits and vegetables out of it. I'm sure there's lots of versions out there but with them the way it works is they try and purchase from smaller farms, etc and it's all volunteer led. They buy in bulk and then split up all the produce between all participants which then yields large amounts for a small price. They have a regular basket which is $15.00 that you have to buy if you participate (or $10 extra to upgrade to organic) and then they have multiple add-ons that you can pay for. This week I got the Italian veggie basket ($8.50) and the Sourdough bread ($10.00).

Regular Basket ($15.00) Bundle Broccoli, Bag of Brussels Sprouts, 4 grapefruit, 6 bananas, bundle Asparagus, 3 zucchini,  4 yams, 6 tomato, 6 apples, 7 tangerines, 1 pineapple, and a head of green leaf lettuce

Italian Veggie Basket (8.50) 1 Eggplant, 2 Lemons, 2 Zucchini, 2Yellow Onions, 1 Red Onion, Mushrooms, 1 bundle Green Onions, Fresh Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Basil

Sourdough Bread (5 loaves for $10.00) This is one of the five loaves of sourdough bread. I put a pen for size comparison

Overall, a pretty good hall considering I spent $38.00 on all of this! There is a $1.50 charge every week you order and the first time you participate a $3.00 charge for them to purchase two baskets to put your produce in. Those baskets stay at the site so don't forget to bring some re-usable shopping bags or a box to put your goodies in. When I first started doing this (this is my 3rd week) I figured I would easily eat all the fruit but would have a hard time with the vegetables. I am learning I was backwards on this however. It's fairly easy to use the vegetables if you plan meals around the vegetables,  it's the fruit that's a bit harder. There's so much of it and only 3 of us and Michael really doesn't eat very much of it. You can't really add fruit to a dinner recipe usually so besides slicing it up with breakfast and lunch, it's been hard for me. I do have a juicer and a food dehydrator though so i'm experimenting with making drinks and dehydrating whatever we don't use. Right now I have 3 pineapples so I really need to figure out a way to start using them! The only other issue we have is sometimes we don't like what's in the basket and since you never really know what will be in there, it's a surprise. This week and last week we had grapefruit. Yuck! My dad happened to stop by last saturday so I gave them to him but i'm going to try and eat at least one this week; perhaps with lots of sugar? Otherwise I will be giving them to my neighbor. The other thing is Brussels sprouts. I can't stand Brussels sprouts. It's one of the very few vegetables that I don't like. Michael on the other hand loves them so i'm going to suck it up and eat them. I just need to find a good recipe. Finding recipes is a lot easier with pinterest but still a little hard for me since I am not very creative. Feel free to post any recipes you might have to share!

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