This week we got the first box of produce from our new CSA, J.R. Organics. Although we received a mid-week email update of all the items that would be in our weekly box it was a bit difficult to plan our recipes based on that information. We needed to know amounts as well. For example, if carrots are said to be in the box, that’s great, but if you are going to make a hefty carrot salad for the week you need a hefty amount of carrots. This was a big challenge, which we resolved by setting up someone who could search Google fast (that’d be me) and another person to write down recipes and check off what was left (that’d be Cameron).
Once this little system of search and inventory was established we were able to knock our prep time down to 3 hours and 45 minutes including clean up time! That is a 2 hour and 15 minute reduction from when we first started. Cameron and I were proud of the level of efficiency we had reached. On top of our time savings in the kitchen we got our grocery shopping down to less than 45 minutes, because we had developed a base of staple items we knew where to find most of our ingredients on the shelves. Raw vegan almond butter, yes, that’s the first isle over from wine and cheese, third shelf…
Knowing where the basics are helps speed up the grocery shopping process.
Week 11 felt streamlined, but in a way that came natural. On top of everything else, we arrived at a deeper level of understanding regarding our food waste. Around the second or third week of our 90 days of rawness Cameron purchased an indoor composter. It wasn’t really until this week until that we fully understood that we aren’t a typical family of four and all of our waste happens in one day, not seven. We had compost overload! This required that we take time to prep our compost (prep your compost, seriously… yeah I know). Although it isn’t as intricate a process as making raw vegan cheesecake, it requires a sharp pair of scissors and some time to cut food waste into small 2-inch parts. This gave us the ability to fill the composter to its brim without overloading it with big chunks of food waste. Later in the day, when the first load settled, we could add in the rest of our scraps.
Cutting up food waste into feasible parts for the composter.
The composter wasn’t the only thing overloaded this week. I too had established some new freelance projects on top of my already hectic work life, thank goodness food prep was done in one day and all I to worry about was feeding my face. All of this finally caught up to me in the form of a light achy cold. This was right around the peak time of the Swine Flu outbreak hysteria, which I found a bit humorous. Once again the diet brought me surprise. My regular weeklong cold of fever, sore throat and plugged nose was reduced to just two days of achy fatigued annoyingness. After a third day of good night’s rest I was back in healthy action, once again ready to tackle life’s challenges.
