Yesterday I had an apointment in San Francisco, and met my friend Jeremy for lunch. I bought a ready-made salad (Salad Nicoise, $3.99) at Trader Joes, which pretty much shot my whole food budget for the day. So dinner was "clean the fridge and make a salad."
Paul helped, and we threw out a lot of stuff. Our fridge, like our home, tends to get filled with interesting things. Things we sometimes forget we have. We're packrats, and we clutter. We discovered a whole lot of cheeses, i combined 2 jars of rasberry jam into one, and 3 jars of pickles into one. i washed all the shelves. for the first time in months i can see the back of the fridge. Lost food is lost money.
The salad was some fancy olives, a zuchini, part of a tomato left over from last week (but still good!), 1/4 onion, 1/2 pickle (saved in the same container as the tomato), olive oil, fresh peas, pepper, salt, and a head of red lettuce. It was really hot yesterday (91 degrees) and so all the salty stuff in the salad tasted good because it was replenishing all the salts I'd sweated out. Definately an on-budget meal.
Some of the produce came from Terra Firma Farm, a local organic farm. Its a CSA (Consumer Supported Agriculture), which means we subscribe, just like a magazine or newspaper. It cost us $52/month and we get a whole box of fresh produce-- stuff picked on Tuesday is in our box on Wednesday, and you can't get much fresher than that unless you grow it yourself or live next to a farm.
This week, since its June, we got a mini watermellon, garlic, peaches, strawberries, string peas, zuchini, and two ears of corn. Pretty good for $13, and none of this stuff requires cooking, except the corn. (see "recipe" below).
Recipe:
Corn on the cob: microwave 2 ears, still in the husk, for 3 minutes, let sit for another five minutes, shuck, add butter, salt and pepper and eat.
