Meet The Mystery Box

I signed us up for this Vegetable Mystery Box. It’s sort of like a CSA Box, but a little different. About once a month this local farm delivers fresh vegetables to a restaurant that just happens to be on our little corner. We’ve seen it for months and finally looked into it and signed up. It’s awesome.

But before I show off all the wonderful, fresh, organic veggie’s we received. Let me back up a bit.

As most of you know-eating healthy, knowing where your food is coming from, knowing what is in your food is all very popular right now. And guess what? We have been paying attention. It’s important stuff-food. None of this is new news to me, but this is the first time Jamie and I have talked about and have set some simple food goals for our family.
Yes, we watched Food, Inc. and I’m listening to In Defense of Food on CD right now. I’ve even watched Jamie’s Oliver’s new show. And I think it’s all fantastic. It’s putting it all out there. I know all my veggie and vegan friends have a little smirk on their face about all this because they figured this out a long time ago.

And NO, let’s not get crazy, we are not announcing that we are becoming vegetarians. But we have decided to make some small changes.

These are our goals:

-Probably the biggest change we are making is we are only going eat meat for dinner three days a week. And by meat I mean; beef, chicken and pork. The remaining nights we will prepare veggie and even vegan friendly meals. Oh, and one those nights could be fish. What I’m trying do is prepare mostly veggie friendly meals most evenings and I may only cook a meat dish once a week, because we go out once or twice a week and we’ll probably have meat when we go out. I know it may not seem like a big change for a lot of people, but I have also told other people about this change and I get “well, my husband has to have some kind of meat with dinner”. The way I view this one is simple; since I’m preparing most of the meals in my household, he is going to get what I make. Jamie doesn’t really argue this point, he’s appreciative of my cooking and he would rather I cook and eat a veggie meal over the latter (him cooking). And I do need to give Jamie some props; ever since AM’s arrival Jamie’s cooking has improved phenomenally, it just takes him forever to prepare a meal. Sorry hun, but you know it’s true. His cooking is reserved for the weekends, and he does help out during the week. He also does most of the shopping. He's a keeper.

-We are going to buy hormone free, grass fed, etc, etc, meat. Basically we are going to buy expensive meat from Whole Foods. But because I’m only making meat once or twice a week, it works for us.

-Cage free eggs.

-Buy more seasonable organic local fruit and vegetables, for example the Mystery Box!

-Minimize processed foods. Or foods in a box. This is probably the hardest one. I rely heavily on canned beans, tomatoes, frozen peas, cereal, stuff like that and I really don’t count that stuff as being bad. It’s the high sugar processed foods, the stuff with the bad ingredients/labels we need to cut back on. You get? And things like making whole wheat pancakes versus making them from a box.

So those are our goals as of now. Simple ones for us. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m writing this so we can hopefully stick to them. It’s not that we eat all that unhealthy to begin with, but think the changes above are reasonable and good for us.

Also, I’m not going to stop making cupcakes or cookies. I think treats like that are important to have in one’s life. At least in my life.

It’s not perfect and there will probably be mess ups. We love eating out and I’m not giving that up. Or desserts. But I think this was the first time Jamie and I sat down and had a conversation about changing the way we eat and shop at home.

Anyway, back to the Mystery Box, here is some of the fantastic stuff we got:

These below are dandelion greens. This was the only thing I was not a fan of. Too bitter.
Fresh goat cheese from happy goats.

Great? Right!

Well, I applaud you if you made it through this post.

Namaste.