A fortnight from FoodShare
Every second Thursday, for the last two years, I await the text to let me know Foodshare has delivered their “Good Food Box, Produce, Small” to my porch. My heart is hardly pounding with excitement about it - it’s not Culinary Adventure Tours, my favourite gourmet food delivery service with boxes curated for every occasion. No, the Good Food Box (GFB) is as about as basic as you can get. Not organic, not necessarily local, but inexpensive, good produce from which I can make inexpensive, good healthy, food. Among many COVID games I play - wordle quordle octordle canuckle banagrams and so on - is using the GFB without letting it go bad or going crazy from the monotony. I’ve amped this up in the last few months as food prices have risen dramatically.
The box’s arrival marks the moment when I think “damn, I still have lettuce, bananas, and carrots from last week. What will they have sent me this time?” You see, this is a standard box - no choice, no heads-up about what you’re getting. You can’t plan ahead - you gotta roll with it.
When I received a box two Thursdays ago, I decided to challenge myself to use it all within the two weeks and report to you on the results. Here is that report. I challenge all the other GFB subscribers to do the same!
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Nothing fancy in this box: onions, carrots, kale, leaf lettuce, bananas (good grief, more bloody bananas - when will they genetically modify them to not ripen all at the very same time?!), a mango (hard as a rock, but hopefully it will soften soon if I store it with the bananas), and two turnips! I’m happy about those turnips. Haven’t had any in an long time.
Night one: use up old food. As much as I would love to jump into processing some of this box, I really need to make sure I’m not throwing out old lettuce. Indeed, there is half a spinner of greens. Salad for dinner. I pull the quick pickled celery (processed from previous box) from the fridge with it and decide to dress this up with seeds and grilled halloumi. I rinse some pumpkin seeds and throw them in a hot cast iron frying pan with some salt and a handful of sunflower seeds, stirring frequently. They start to brown and pop so I transfer them to a bowl to cool. I grill halloumi strips in the same pan. Compile a salad and voilà - dinner done. And still all that great food from today’s haul to think about.
Night two: continue with the old; start in on the new. It’s Good Friday and despite not being a Catholic, some of Jack’s culture rubbed off on me. I will make fish and chips from scratch. I pull potatoes from last week’s box from the fridge and cut them into fries. I have never really had success with oven-baking them but I do a little Googling find a recommendation to soak them in cold water first to remove some of the starch. The result - slightly crispier; next time they’ll be better. My fish though is breaded and fried to perfection. I convert the cucumber to “mizeria,” a Polish salad of sliced cukes in a vinegar and sour cream dressing with salt and pepper. I don’t have dill. Jack would be disappointed. I grate a carrot and a beet (last GFB) into a slaw with a few seeds on top. Done. Near-restaurant quality Good Friday dinner from the fridge.
Night three: more carrot/beet slaw, this time mixed with some leaf lettuce and served with a toasted kaiser with fried fish, tartar sauce, and cucumbers on it. A fine repeat of last night, with a view to getting through the box without waste. Oh, and today I converted all the apples in my fridge from previous orders into a fine apple cider with sorrel, cinnamon, cloves, anise, and rum. Can’t wait to serve it warm to a friend in the gazebo tomorrow.
Night four: Time to tackle the onions and kale. I caramelize the former with some Kinsip maple syrup then braise the kale with the onions and some bacon. Those caramelized onions will go well with my breakfast sandwich all week. I cook up a handful of egg noodles and throw them in, and grate a little parm on top with a chopped scallion. In the evening I whip up some sourdough chocolate banana bread from the bananas left from last box. I never quite stay ahead of those darned bananas.
Night five: a play on ramen - I thinly slice a carrot and some kale and simmer in a miso base. I cook ramen noodles separately and then poach an egg in the miso broth. Finally, I slice my last piece of fried fish and top it all with Umami seasoning. Life is good.
Night six: unexpected offer of food from a neighbour. Turkey giblets to be exact. I’m known for an undiscerning palate (or so non-giblet lovers think). I quickly snap them up and am given two cooked drumsticks as a bonus. I simmer the giblets, create a light broth with them, add some skinny egg noodles designed for soup and sour cream and serve that beside a drumstick on a bed of the beet/carrot slaw.
Night seven: I stretch the turkey soup, thicken it to a stew, and add mushrooms, kale, tomatoes, and scallions. I’m making a dent in the kale which I should love but don’t really.
Night eight: The mango is soft! I turn it into a quick salsa with tomatoes, onions, lime juice, and a little sugar. I roast a small chicken, and serve a leg atop mashed turnip and stuffing. All this after finishing a full day’s work and I’m eating it by 6:30. Not commuting downtown has so improved my eating habits.
Night nine: I combine chicken, kale, roasted red peppers, mushrooms, and pasta in a cream sauce with crispy fried onions as a garnish. The box items are nearly all gone now. Just carrots, onions, and kale - and bananas of course. Always those pesky bananas.
Night ten: It’s all leftovers tonight — chicken, stuffing, turnip, gravy with a side salad of mango salsa and arugula. Arugula never comes in the GFB but I’ve picked up my Superstore ‘click and collect’ over this week so I’ve got some supplementary produce. The GFB never quite sees me through.
Night eleven: I’ve been off to the country on a meat run so tonight it’s smoked pork sausage with red cabbage slaw and sautéed mushrooms. No GFB produce. I give up on ever eating the bananas and pop them in the freezer for the next round of sourdough banana bread.
Night twelve: It’s the world’s weirdest salad - greens with red cabbage slaw, the last of the mango salsa, and sausage. At this point in the fortnight, my taste has become less discerning.
Night thirteen: There are still some carrots from the original box but other than that, it’s just the kale and some lettuce. I use the last of the kale for a cream pasta sauce with tomato, mushroom, leek, and sausage, add some egg noodles and dust the whole thing with parmesan.
Night fourteen: I’ve kept the lettuce from going bad by wrapping it in paper towel until a day or two ago when I washed it in the spinner and put the whole thing in the fridge. Still crisp. I turn the last of it into a salad with more pickled celery, cold sliced pork steak, and Japanese sesame dressing. The weirder the combo, the better, I say! Especially at day 14.
And that, my readers, is how to make food last. Nothing thrown out for two weeks. And now the cycle starts again.
More bloody carrots, onions, and bananas! Oh but good, some grape tomatoes. That’s a change.
