The Pantry Challenge

Only 3 weeks into the blog, and already we’ve decided to shake things up a bit! Last week Audrey and I did a pantry inventory, the results of which may be found here: October 10 pantry inventory.

Since we’re pretty well-stocked, we thought it might be fun to see how well we can live out of our pantry. We’ve got stuff in the fridge too, of course--assorted cheeses, jams, butter, 4 eggs, leftover Thai curry, tortillas, and so forth--and since we’re all in favor of fresh vegetables, Audrey signed us up for a week of a fruits-and-vegetables co-op, which we picked up on Saturday morning. I also bought a gallon of milk. And that, my friends, is going to be what we eat this week. We’ll make an exception for one eating-out each (since both of us are fairly friendly people, and occasionally get invited out for lunch), and if we go to eat at someone’s house of course we’ll cheerfully eat their food--and bring some of our own! Otherwise we’ll be eating from our pantry and fridge for breakfast, lunch, and dinner all this week. We’ll also break our usual update schedule of Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday; this week we’ll be posting every day to let you know how it goes!

For the curious, here’s the website for the co-op: Bountiful Baskets. They’ve got locations all over the Intermountain West and the Pacific Northwest. As you can see from some fairly exotic fruit offerings they’re not a local CSO (Community-Supported Agriculture) group, but they’re both cheaper, fresher, and friendlier than most local grocery stores. As they explain on their Current Offerings page:

In the conventional basket we focus our buying as follows: High Quality, Low Cost and As Local as Possible… So, how hard do we try? Pretty hard! Most bananas are from Central America or the Carribbean and are grown by a couple gargantuan conglomerate growers. We get all of our bananas from small farmers in central Mexico. This saves the co-op between $4 and $7 a box, keeps money with small farmers, and helps keep the carbon footprint small.

So, what did we get from our Bountiful Basket? Quite a lot!

Bountiful Basket booty:
1 pineapple
2 pomegranate
1 large bunch bananas
7 green apples
4 pears
1 bag red grapes
4-5 parsnips
~1 lb yams
2 romaine lettuce
1 bunch spinach
1 bunch broccoli
4 tomatoes

Cost: $19.50 first-time user (normally $16.50)