One Hundred Dollars a Month

This is a Guest Post by the Super Amazing One Hundred Dollars a Month reader Mel {she’s the one who made A Freezer Meal Menu Plan for Four Month’s Worth of Meals, and then made a Big List of Freezer Meal Recipes and Freezer Meal Cooking Tips. Mel has also shared how she made all those AWESOME gift bags and shared her recipe for DIY Lemonade Concentrate}. I think at this point, we pretty much all want to live next to Mel. I know I do! 😉 Here is her latest post:

Our CSA Experience

Over the years, I’ve perfected my freezer meal game, but I still struggled with my vegetable game. Most of our frozen main courses had some vegetables in them, but I like having vegetable sides with meals to liven them up and make the main course stretch a bit further. But, even with having our main courses set, I still couldn’t seem to keep up with the veggies. There were a number of issues:

We have a garden, but it’s unreliable. We can grow tomatoes, garlic, and herbs pretty reliably, but everything else is extremely unpredictable. Even if everything worked out every year, we’re limited on space. So, I cook what we can grow, but what we can grow varies hugely year to year. Fall/winter gardening is especially challenging since it gets dark before I get home from work.

I psych myself out. We grocery shop after work on Friday nights. It’s quiet and a good use of time when we’re too tired to do much else, but it’s also a time when I’m not super motivated. So, I’ll tend to choose vegetables that are easier to prepare, even though later that week I might have the energy to deal with something more involved. I call this “vegetable lazy.” The result? We tend to buy the same things every week, so we get bored and lack variety, especially in winter when there is less is in season. 

Our local grocery stores are not great. Okay, grocery stores vex me for a number of reasons–why do carts have cup holders but not a place to put my phone so I can view my shopping list hands free!?–but our local stores are often just laughably bad on produce quality. Perfectly good-looking onions will be rotten inside. Fruit flies abound. I’ve seen moldy piles of zucchini sitting on shelves. Even when the produce looks okay, it rots at an alarming rate, perhaps because it’s been shipped from who knows where, so I can’t always cook everything before it becomes compost. 

We try to support local farms, but the infrastructure just isn’t there. Our farmers market is only open from Easter to Thanksgiving, and only on Saturday mornings. Since we grocery shop Friday night, that would be two trips pretty much back to back, plus an additional grocery run if any of the farmers market stuff required extra ingredients. It’s a great market, but the hours make for very inefficient meal planning and very crowded shopping.

So, with all that in mind, I started considering a CSA (community supported agriculture), where you buy weekly boxes of vegetables from a farm. Our area has several CSAs, but the pickup is usually…at the farmers market on Saturday mornings. If we could make it to the farmers market reliably, we wouldn’t need a CSA! Pickup aside, I had other concerns as well.

First, CSAs are notorious for providing challenging quantities of unusual vegetables, and I didn’t know if I would be able to deal with that if I couldn’t even convince myself to buy more labor-intensive vegetables at the grocery store. Second, I worried about the cost; most CSAs were around $30 a week, which is comparable to what we spend on produce, but I wasn’t sure if the money would go as far. Third, most of the CSA options seemed to be pretty limited in terms of variety. One did not have corn or squash, others did not have winter shares, etc. The CSA was looking like another vegetable dead end.

But then, I stumbled on one CSA that seemed a little different called Chesapeake Farmery. It delivers straight to the homes of subscribers, it pulls from multiple local farms for maximum variety, and it is year-round. It is not organic certified, but it does use organic practices.

The price was comparable to other CSAs at $28 a week, but the price included home delivery and for $4 extra a week (25% less than our grocery store price), it even included eggs. You can pause your delivery if you go on vacation, and you can also opt out of items you just don’t like.

Beyond that, it seemed like it was run by really good people; they employ adults with special needs, and they donate to a variety of local causes. I hesitated for another 10 months or so, but then, heading into a fall so busy there was no hope of a fall garden, I decided to try it. After a few months of deliveries, I am now kicking myself for waiting. 

For the most part, the adjustment to weekly CSA deliveries was seamless. The CSA veggies last much longer than store bought, the amounts are generous but manageable, and the variety (thanks to the inclusion of items from multiple local farms and occasionally an item or two from select farms elsewhere on the East Coast) has been amazing. The flavor is also really impressive—those Red Delicious apples were actually delicious.

Our bag of goodies is delivered on Friday to a cooler on our porch, and I take a photo each week so I have a quick reference of what we have on hand. I sometimes buy a few other produce items from the grocery store—usually fruit or maybe a random veggie to round out a recipe—but the CSA is probably 90% of our produce, and our grocery bill has decreased by about the same amount as the cost of the CSA.

The price has pretty much worked out to $3 a vegetable, but that includes delivery and supports small, local farms. As much as I worried about not being able to deal with what is delivered, I’ve found that it’s actually much easier to just be assigned vegetables than to choose them myself. Here are some of the things we’ve made (some recipes were adapted based on what was delivered):

Scalloped Potatoes

Fennel Orange Salad with Orange Honey Dressing

Sweet Potato Pie

Broiled Grapefruit (with French toast cups and syrup for dipping)

Cinnamon Brown Sugar Butternut Squash

Salad with Ranch Dressing and Potato and Fennel Gratin (with Oven-Fried Chicken)

Guacamole

Zuppa Toscana

Ravioli with Parmesan Cream Sauce and Roasted Broccoli, Peppers, and Tomatoes

Zucchini Oatmeal Muffins

Sheet Pan Nachos with Extra Veggies

Pasta Aglio e Olio (with Shrimp)

Everyday Kale Salad (with Scrambled Eggs and Garlic Bread)

In addition to specific recipes, I’ve developed some general strategies for using up CSA veggies:

• Roasting a pan of assorted veggies and adding them to a dish or serving as a side,
• Mixing a salad of whatever veggies we have on hand (these can be rounded out with beans, meat, roasted red peppers, eggs, croutons, nuts, etc.) and topped with a dressing that matches the meal we’re having,
• Topping sandwiches,
• Using our spiralizer to mix zoodles into pasta,
• Snacking (plain or with a dip or spread like hummus, ranch, guacamole, or a cheeseball),
• Wilting (kale, spinach, bok choy, etc.) into soups or pasta,
• Frying or sautéing as a side,
• Grating for muffins, breads, cookies, or cakes. I’m trying out kale cookies this weekend.

CSA Vegetables working their way into every corner of my lunch: leftover roasted broccoli, zucchini muffin, homemade hamburger helper with bok choy, and grape tomatoes

So, cooking has been remarkably simple. I just use up the vegetables we get each week, sometimes finding a new recipe and sometimes just using a variation of an old favorite. We’re eating more vegetables than we used to (my husband and I calculated that we’re each eating about 1 lb. of veggies a day), but it’s somehow easier to use them up knowing that we need to clear fridge space to make room for the next delivery—that really pushes me to use up that last carrot or pepper.

We’re also eating a better variety of veggies. For example, we like fennel, but I never buy it, so it’s nice to be reminded about it. My husband loves mushrooms and avocado, and I’m not a fan, but it’s nice to have them delivered so that I can prepare them for him.

I also learned that I like sugar snap peas; I always preferred snow peas because the sugar snaps from the grocery store were always so tough and starchy, but they’re entirely different fresh. With the exception of a few mushrooms that I missed during Thanksgiving week, we also have been able to use everything, and it’s really nice not having produce always going bad in the fridge.

One thing that has been a little trickier is storage. Even though the produce is super fresh, the CSA typically only uses paper bags, which are great for transport but less great for storage. I really love the eco-friendly part of that, but I didn’t know how to store items like lettuce without plastic produce bags.

For a while, I recycled a few grocery store produce bags I had, but I wanted to avoid limited use plastic since it isn’t even really the best way to store vegetables. I looked into special storage bags like these and laughed SO HARD at the idea of paying that amount for a single bag.

I tried sewing one bag myself as a test, but I had trouble getting the size right, and I realized I really dislike the flap closure design since it makes it hard to get delicate stuff like lettuce in and out. Finally, I realized that a bag is unnecessary, and I started wrapping lettuce and greens (and even broccoli) in a damp dish towel.

I gather the ends of the towel and secure with a rubber band, and then put it in the crisper drawer to help lock in the moisture in the towel. This setup makes it easy to open and close the towel to grab a piece of lettuce for a sandwich, and it’s also a cheap, no-sew, and one-size-fits-all approach. Best of all, it actually works! The damp towel seems to really keep greens fresh.

For other vegetables, I have been using these OXO containers since I already had them. I’m not wild about the space they take up, the fact that the lids just sit on top, and the fact that you have to replace the ethylene absorber cartridges, but they do work pretty well. And I like that the colander insert in them makes it easy to wash veggies. Speaking of colanders, I have gotten reacquainted with my salad spinner, which is the best way I’ve found for washing and drying greens and also for storing washed greens. 

All in all, we’re thrilled with how this experiment turned out, and we’re excited to see where it goes next. Our chickens have just started laying eggs, but we’ve decided to continue receiving the CSA eggs as well since we can always give away extras and since we’ll need the delivery in winter anyway.

We’re still using up freezer meals from the fall, so it may be a bit of an adjustment when we go back to regular meal planning, so one of my goals for the year is to make our own spice mixes for some of the vegetable recipes we’ve discovered so that they are even easier to prepare. I’m also interested to see how the CSA changes by season and how well I’m able to juggle summer deliveries in addition to the tomato explosion that occurs in our yard each August.

But even though we might have to adapt slightly to what’s in our freezer or garden, I still feel grateful each Friday when we go grocery shopping and I can more or less bypass the entire produce section. Now, if only I had Mavis’s local bakery.

~Mel