Eating Locally: Discovering our Co-op

Back in California, eating local, organic and humanely raised food was relatively simple. Sure it took more than a simple trip to the supermarket, but there were so many options for CSAs, a wealth of farmer's markets year-round, and even locally owned grocery stores that stocked great CA-grown products. We belonged to both a fruit/veggie CSA and a meat CSA, bought our eggs directly from a farmer at the farmer's market, and had access to an amazing number of resources for the kind of food we want to buy.

After moving to Colorado, I can see just how spoiled for options California is!

Here, the growing season is much shorter than I was used to (year round crops in CA, roughly May-Oct in CO). The farmer's markets ended before we even moved into our house, and they won't start up again until May. There are fewer CSA options, and most are only available during the summer. When I go to the grocery store, most of the fruit and vegetables are brought in from CA!

So imagine how happy I was when a neighborhood friend invited me to join her at a meet and greet for the High Plains Food Co-op. It is a network of local farmers (again, cue the shock as I realize "local" here includes Kansas and Nebraska, which are both closer to Denver than Los Angeles is to San Francisco) and the co-op facilitates sales directly to the consumer. Transparency is important, and all the farmers welcome visitors. All of the meat is humanely raised, and some farms are certified organic -- not all have gone through certification, but all follow organic principles. There are free range and pastured eggs for less than the cost of store-bought cage free eggs. There is even a farmer who sells heritage wheat flours! The vegetable selections are limited right now, and the fruit selections are only dried or jams, but I'm looking forward to seeing those offerings come spring.

For our first order, we got the following:

• 1 dozen pastured eggs
• 1 package of German bratwurst
• cheddar sampler pack (3 varieties, about 1lb total)
• lamb shanks
• triticale flour
• heritage turkey red flour
• ground beef
• chuck roast
• whole roasting chicken

They even gave us an insulated tote to keep everything cold, which I will reuse for future orders. We haven't tried everything yet, but so far we are happy with this resource for good, humane, locally raised food.

Conservation Monday #6: Why I Meal Plan

In the hectic existence that is a master's thesis, I missed my Conservation Monday post last week. Oops! I hope today's post makes up for it!

I want to break from my regular list format today and discuss in depth one of the ways I have practically eliminated food waste. I have accomplished this through the use of a fairly simple tool: the meal plan.

Some people have incredibly elaborate, detailed meal plans. Some plan an entire month's meals at once! This is not for me, because we prefer to eat with the seasons and are members of a fruit/veggie CSA as well as a meat CSA. I absolutely love my CSA memberships, as they encourage us to try new foods, eat all of our fruit and vegetable servings, eat locally and eat organically. The occasional downside is that we don't know the contents of the veggie box until the weekend before it arrives, and we don't know the contents of the meat box until I open it!

This element of surprise has led me to the following method:

When I get a box, I write down in the notes section of my planner ALL of the contents. I have a column for fruit, a column for vegetables, and a column for meat. (Since the meat arrives once a month and vegetables currently come every other week, I end up with more fruit and vegetable lists than meat lists)

The list looked like this in February after I opened our first meat box:

• ground beef
• ground pork
• ground lamb
• leg of lamb
• pork chops
• pork butt
• carrots
• artichokes
• romanesco
• lettuce
• kale
• shallots
• apples
• oranges
• lemons

Then, I work to plan meals within the basic schedule I have in which Mondays are leftovers, Tuesdays are typically pasta, Wednesdays are often soup, Thursdays are leftovers and Friday, Saturday and Sunday can be anything. I'm flexible about moving pasta and soup nights around, but establishing those gave me a decent framework to make sure meals never get too repetitive. (After all, I studied in Italy for a year and I would be happy eating pasta every night, but that wouldn't be OK with Sean!) As I figure out a recipe for each ingredient, I cross it off the list. For instance:

• ground beef
• ground pork - baked eggs & kale
• ground lamb
• leg of lamb - lamb tagine
• pork chops
• pork butt
• carrots
• artichokes
• romanesco
• lettuce
• kale - baked eggs & kale
• shallots
• apples
• oranges
• lemons 

I continue matching ingredients to recipes and recipes to days until I have figured out what to do with all the produce. I try to use delicate produce, like the leafy greens, first since they wilt, whereas the heartier stuff can wait closer to the next box. The meat needs to last all month, and it's in the freezer, so I don't worry as much about figuring out a recipe for each piece right away. I typically get about a week and a half of meal planning done at a time.

I write the week's plan in my planner and on a fridge calendar. I love that with the meal plan right there on the fridge, there's never a question of what to make for dinner!

Of course, then there are weeks like tech, when I'm not even home in the evenings to make dinner, and Sean gets cute with the "meal plan":

Won't have tech again for a while, as I finish this thesis. But at least I know he can handle the "meal planning" without me!

My meal planning system isn't perfect yet, and part of that has to do with spontaneity. Sometimes I plan something, but then we end up having a last minute dinner with friends. The meal plan gets shifted to accommodate, which is why if you read all of my meal plan posts you'll see certain meals carrying over into the next week.

We have also had a few times when I was supposed to make the new soup for "soup night" but I looked into the fridge and there was still leftover soup. I'm not making a whole new pot when there are still jars of leftovers sitting in the fridge, so it becomes an impromptu "leftovers" night.

Despite the couple kinks I'm still working out in our plan, we have cut food waste down to almost nothing. The worms get any kitchen scraps that aren't meat, dairy or citrus. It can take a long time now to ever fill up the kitchen garbage can, and it's a fairly small one to begin with! I'm very happy with the progress we've made, and I plan to keep working to reduce our waste even further as well as take all the stress out of dinner time!

Do you meal plan? What's your system? Share in the comments!

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 One Project At A Time

Package of Meat (or, why we started using a meat CSA)

We joined a fruit and vegetable CSA about a year and a half ago, back when we moved into our condo. While some people argue that you can get better deals on produce at the Farmer's Market, as graduate students we have found the convenience of delivered veggies to be irreplaceable. For those in Northern California who are curious, we use Farm Fresh to You. The big reason why we chose them is the ability to completely customize the delivery schedule. Depending on how busy we are in a given month, we get deliveries either every other week or every 3 or even 4 weeks (filling in with visits to the Farmer's Market between box deliveries). We also enjoy the discovery of new vegetables we might not otherwise try, and I enjoy the challenge of eating with the seasons and using up everything we have. Without a CSA box, would I have learned so many ways to eat leeks? I doubt it.

Recently we joined another CSA group -- a meat one. These are not as common as the produce CSAs, and it took quite a bit of research to find one that met our needs. (If you're in the Bay Area, the one we settled on is Marin Sun Farms.)

Why did we decide to sign up for a once a month delivery of meat? We have been discussing on and off the problems with conventionally raised meat animals. The horrors of factory farms turn my stomach and make me sad. I completely understand why some people choose to become vegetarian, but, while I frequently will do meatless days, a completely meatless diet isn't for us.

I was buying organic chicken at the store, and organic grass fed beef...but while that helps, distributors still try to keep costs down for chain grocery stores so it's not always the most humane choice.

We started buying meat at the Farmer's Market, which was nice because we could chat with the farmers and know that the meat was organic and came from animals who were allowed to free range or pasture. But, again with our unpredictable schedules, sometimes we couldn't make it to the Farmer's Market. Or we would get there later and the more cost effective cuts would be sold out.

our first meat box delivery

We had been researching meat CSAs on and off for months, but finally made the jump with the new year. Here are the points that caused us to choose Marin Sun Farms:

1. Local, pasture raised livestock. While their farms are not certified organic (which can be costly for the farm) they do guarantee that their livestock are never fed antibiotics or growth hormones. Most importantly for us, the livestock live in pastures for most of the year, and are treated humanely.

2. Ability to get only the amount of meat we need. Some meat CSAs use the old model of customers paying an upfront sum, then receiving a half a cow when processing time comes. This wouldn't work for us, since we only have a small freezer! With this CSA we get about 6lbs of meat per month at a monthly rate. If we know we won't be available to pick up our box, we can call ahead of time to cancel that delivery.

3. Variety. This first box, we received about 1lb each of ground lamb, pork, and beef as well as a small leg of lamb, a pork butt shoulder and two pork chops. I like this variety because we will never get bored with the meat in the freezer. And who knows what we will receive next month?

Here's a good article about meat CSAs : link

Another benefit of this CSA is the reduced packaging. Yes, everything is vacuum sealed in plastic. But there are none of those extra Styrofoam trays, or the weird absorbing things that sometimes are packaged under meat at the grocery store. The cardboard box everything comes in is recyclable or reusable. So, per pound of meat, we are throwing less in the garbage than if we were buying conventional meat at the grocery store.

Those are my thoughts on our meat CSA so far. I'll be digging into the ground pork this weekend for our Baked Eggs with Kale dinner, so I'm quite excited about that!

Do you have any experience with CSAs, produce or meat? Please share in the comments!

*Neither Farm Fresh to You nor Marin Sun Farms has anything to do with my writing of this post. Eating locally and Community Supported Agriculture is just something that I've become quite interested in and I wanted to share my experiences thus far.*