Baskets of Bounty at Zero and Below

Grabbing my share at the Bountiful Baskets pick-up site this morning.

I have blogged quite frequently of my passion for farmer’s markets and fresh, local produce. During the summer before last, I was a shareholder in a CSA Farm (Community-Supported Agriculture, or sometimes Community-Shared Agriculture).

For those of you who don’t know how this works, a local organic farm decided to sell shares to the community.  At the beginning of the growing season (let’s say summer), you buy a share of the harvest.  “Buying in” is not only a payment of monies but an agreement to volunteer a few hours one Saturday during the harvest time to go work on the farm.  Then, throughout the harvest season you pick up your share every week.  In this share box is a sizeable surprise of fruits and vegetable hand-picked earlier that day or yesterday.

One of my first share pick-ups from my old CSA in the summer of 2010.

I loved the entire venture.  Not only did I get an amazingly large portion of the harvest every week, but I was able to go put my hands in the dirt.  Every week I would receive fresh peppers, tomatoes, and greens, but I would also receive something I’d never seen before – or something I’d never bothered to try.  I would have to look up these strange items and figure out ways to eat them.

But I live in the high desert, and in the snowy months there is not much in the way of local produce nearby.  So every fall, I slowly return to the grocery store to buy less exciting produce shipped in from destinations unknown.

A few months back, my friends Danielle and Justin had me over for dinner.  Over the course of the wonderful meal, they mentioned that all the vegetables had been received from an organization called Bountiful Baskets and was quite inexpensive.

Bountiful Baskets is “a grassroots, all volunteer, no contracts, no catch co-operative”.  I started contributing as a member the next week, and I was astonished by all I received for $15!  I received so much produce that I didn’t contribute again until two weeks later.  Nowadays, I contribute every two weeks, and there is more than enough fruits and vegetables to last me.

And we’ve made a community of it!  Danielle, Justin, and I woke up early this morning to drive out together to the pick-up spot.  I have other friends who are jumping on-board, and this is why:

Today’s conventional basket from BOUNTIFUL BASKETS included all this produce for $15.00!

Today’s “Conventional Basket” from Bountiful Baskets cost only $15.00 and included all this:  4 grapefruits, 5 bananas, 6 oranges, 6 apples, 1 lb. strawberries, 7 carrots (rainbowed!), 1 bunch of celery, 1 pint of grape tomatoes, 2 avocados, 2 lbs. of Brussels sprouts, and a 1/2 lb. baby peppers.

Now, I don’t remember the exact prices of these items at the grocery store, but here is what I do know (based on Grand Junction prices):  A pound of strawberries are $2.50-$3.00; a pint of grape tomatoes would cost me $3.00-$4.00; 2 avocados would cost me $3.00-$5.00; 6 oranges would cost around $3.00 – and that already has us at $15.00 if I had bought all of this at my neighborhood City Market.

Bountiful Baskets also offers regular and seasonal add-on packages.  These add-ons could be anything from 20 lbs. of apples to assorted nuts.  This week, I added on the “Lunch Box Pack” which the weekly e-mail said was “hoping for apples, citrus, pear, and asian pear”.  Here was the outcome:

The “Lunch Box Pack” for this week’s add-on only cost $10.50!

The “Lunch Box Pack” only cost $10.50 and included:  2 pomegranates, 4 red pears, 3 asian pears, 5 fuji apples, 2 granny smith apples, and 7 oranges!  Can you imagine this cost at the store?  2 pomegranates would cost you $5.00 on its own!

Bountiful Baskets regularly has add-ons for bread.  Occasionally they have sourdough and baguettes, but they always have their “Organic Original Sweet 9-Grain Bread”:

Bountiful Baskets original ORGANIC Sweet 9-Grain Bread comes in bundles of 5 loaves for $12.00!

I purchased a bundle of this amazing bread when I first started with Bountiful Baskets in early November.  I froze four of the loaves, and gradually finished them off this past week!  Can you imagine paying less than $2.50 for a loaf of Organic 9-Grain bread at Whole Foods or Vitamin Cottage?

So I pass this information on to you.  Bountiful Baskets is a great way to cut out the middle man and pay less to fill your life with healthy and fresh foods.

Sounds like a great way to start 2013 to me.  Enjoy 🙂

“The Beet is the Most Intense…”

Beets!

I love the Farmer’s Market.  Where food is concerned, I live for the summer months and all that glorious fresh produce, and talk about it endlessly during the fall, winter, and spring months.  Today’s market visit yielded quite a bit of lovely veggies – onions, peaches (nearly three weeks early this year!), cherries, potatoes, tomatoes, zucchini, and squash – but the most important purchase is always beets.

When I was a kid, there were only two things that I was diametrically opposed to eating – coconut and beets.  I would eat most anything put in front of me, but coconut and beets were a definite “no, thank you”.  Then I came into my thirties, and I tried both coconut and beets again.  I found that I like coconut, but I am obsessed with beets.

My routine at the Farmer’s Market is to go from one farmer’s tent to the next, and I typically buy at least something from each vendor.  Maybe I’ll buy cherries at Bikki’s and tomatoes at Z’s, but one thing is for certain – I will buy beets from someone.  In fact, I’m so obsessed with beets while they’re in season that I have been known to buy beets from more than one vendor having found an even more desirable size, shape, or hue.

Me peeling some roasted beets.

And while I enjoy the hunt for beets much like a pig enjoys it’s search for truffles, I enjoy preparing and eating them even more.  I enjoy chopping off their greens and scrubbing up these clay-clad grey-coats.  I enjoy throwing them in the oven and beginning the meditation on patience as I wait for them to roast.  I enjoy looking at them when they are taken from the oven, far from defeated as they lay in a pool of bloody water.  I enjoy burning my fingers because I can’t wait to cut in and peel them to get them in a bowl.

A “bloody” mess!

I enjoy eating the first slice as I begin cutting the purplish bloody hearts –

it always tastes like the garden, rich and earthy

like dirt

it tastes like Arkansas in July

all day playing in the creek bed behind my Papa’s crazy-bricked house

swimming through the drenched air to cool off in the swimming pool

on the carport eating fresh tomatoes

cut up on a paper plate with a sprinkle of salt

of getting a hug from Papa after he’d been working in the yard all day

the smell of fresh mowed grass and sun-baked earth

so thick in the air and in the nose

that you can taste it.

I can’t cook beets without thinking of my favorite book by Tom Robbins – Jitterbug Perfume. I was introduced to this book and author through an ex-lover who read these cuttings aloud to entice me.  It worked, and the author, the book, the passages, and that moment in time are forever with me – and always brought to the surface by my favorite food – beets.

“The beet is the most intense of vegetables.  The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion.  Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity.  Beets are deadly serious…the beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime.  The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot.  The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.”

– “Today’s Special”, Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins

“Only the beet departs the body the same color as it went in.  Beets consumed at dinner will, come morning, stock a toilet bowl with crimson fish, their hue attesting to beet’s chromatic immunity to the powerful digestive acids and thoroughgoing microbes that can turn the reddest pimento, the organist carrot, the yellowest squash into a singe disgusting shade of brown.  At birth we are red-faced, round, intense, pure.  The crimson fire of universal consciousness burns in us.  Gradually, however, we are devoured by parents, gulped by schools, chewed up by peers, swallowed by social institutions, wolfed by bad habits, and gnawed by age; and by the time we have been digested, cow style, in those six stomachs, we emerge a single disgusting shade of brown.

The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown.”

– “The Bill”, Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins

Roasted Beets with Walnuts

I got the idea for this recipe from The Joy of Cooking p. 269.

1 lb beets

olive oil

balsamic vinegar (optional)

1/3 cup walnuts, chopped

1/4 cup parmesan cheese

Heat oven to 350.  Trim greens from top of beets and trim stems to about an inch.  Scrub the beets and place them in a 8″ square pan, add 1/2 cup of water, and cover with foil.  Roast beets until cooked – 40 minutes to 1 1/2 hours depending on size and number.  Allow to cool and cut off top and stem and peel the heart.  Cut the heart into slices or chunks and put in bowl.  Toss in walnuts, a dash of olive oil, a dash of balsamic vinegar, and parmesan cheese. Enjoy! 🙂

Roasted Beets with Walnuts