Saturday, June 16, 2012

Weekly Shopping

Several people have asked if I am going to change my shopping list to reflect the change of seasons, but sadly here in Minnesota there is virtually nothing local to buy yet.  What there is I have added though, and it's remarkable how it shapes my shopping to go to the produce department and search out the local food and emphasize it.  We didn't sign up for a CSA this summer, we seem to use an every 3 year schedule of CSA buying, it's hard to get motivated to use a CSA when the co-op is at the end of your block.

I haven't posted in a while, and truly haven't shopped normally in a while because one of my closest childhood friends has been very ill and died last week.  I spent a fair amount of time cooking, cleaning, and gardening for him, in an attempt to help.  But more than lost time, I spent a lot of time grieving and sad.  I am sure I will write more about it later.  The intensity of my own recent grief, losing my friend, the end of the school year, and the hectic pace of life in general would have been a great time to just plug in menus and shopping lists from the past.  Instead we ate from day to day, David did most of the cooking.  And we got a lot of takeout.  True Thai has a gluten free menu now!  Himilaya continues to be the best local Napli food, and I have become obsessed with Brasa.  Did you know everything at Brasa is gluten free except for the bread and corn bread?  Nothing they deep fry has gluten.  None of their sauces have gluten.  And it's really easy to order low-carb.  The place is dietary nirvana for me.

In fact, how weird would it be to go get some pulled beef and fried yucca for breakfast?

But I did go shopping this week, so down to business:

We started in the meat department, my vegetarian daughter is right, I do place meat at the center of my meal ideas these days.  We got two pounds of ground beef, some fresh brat worst, a package of bacon, a half pound of breakfast sausage, a pound of ground pork, a chuck roast, a whole chicken, a package of smoked trout, and a boston butt roast.  Now that I type it there is a lot of pork there.  Generally I try to emphasize fish and ruminant meat.

We walked back towards produce by way of the dairy department.  We bought whole milk, cream, whole milk cottage cheese, sour cream, 2 things of butter, whole milk plain yogurt, 5 small yogurts, and 3 dozen jumbo eggs.  All of our dairy was organic, and all but the small yogurts and cottage cheese was local.

In the produce department we searched for local produce, and then looked for seasonal produce, and then broke down and added the out of season shipped from who knows where staples.  We got: local lettuce, local tomatoes (hoop house?) local asparagus, local kale, local red chard, local scallions, local kohlrabi, local bok choi, local bell peppers, local button mushrooms, shitake mushrooms, onions, jalapeƱos, avocados, celery, a musk melon, plums, limes, sweet potatoes, ginger, and bananas.  There are great looking local strawberries, but we don't need them because we are getting a big bowl of strawberries a day from our garden.

Bulk we got: rolled oats, walnuts, almonds, sesame seeds.

Cheese department: cheddar, co-jack, goat cheese, bulk string cheese, and swiss cheese, all local.

Prepared food: two cans of raspberry green tea, my son was having a friend over and this was as close to soda as we would let him get, cheese puffs, pickles, chocolate whey protein powder, dehydrated coconut, freeze dried strawberries, gluten free sugar cookie mix, gluten free brownie mix, corn tortillas, and whole wheat hamburger buns.

Our P6 total was %56.  If you took out my son's junk food it would have been closer to %65.

We went over our budget by exactly the cost of the chocolate whey protein powder.  For some reason my son NEEDED to have several odd things for his sleepover, including whey powder. The kicker?  They didn't even have any of the whey during the sleepover.  They did make dinner though, hamburgers, baked sweet potato fries, and yogurt granola parfaits.  My son and his friend are entering a healthy school lunch contest, and they are convinced that Michelle Obama is going to come have lunch with them next school year as their prize.  For a vegetarian my son had very strong opinions about how to make the burgers, but everyone said they were super good.



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