Healthy Changes, Day One: Bountiful Baskets

In my humble opinion, step one to being healthier is eating healthier foods. Nathan and I try to stay away from ultra-processed convenience foods as much as possible but we still find ourselves not eating as many fresh fruits and veggies as we'd like to. With the exception of potatoes and bananas, everything's so expensive!

Luckily, thanks to a few friends, neighbors, and coworkers, we kept hearing about something called Bountiful Baskets and decided to give it a try a couple weeks ago! The short explanation is you pay $15 on Monday, and on Saturday you pick up something like $50 worth of fresh produce! You never know what you're going to get, because the people who run the co-op try to buy seasonal produce directly from farmers.

But it's always fresh and always good. Don't believe me? See what we picked up on Saturday morning!

Right there we've got 10 lbs of potatoes, four bananas, a cantaloupe, a pound of grapes, a pound of strawberries, two tomatoes, a head of cauliflower, a bunch of celery, a head of romaine lettuce, and SIX ears of corn. 

On top of that, we had five apples, five tomatoes, two cucumbers, and ANOTHER 5 lbs bag of potatoes left over from last week! And a banana, but I used it for banana bread :) I cut up a cucumber and put it in a pitcher of water and let it chill. Cucumber water is a delicious and refreshing summertime drink!

Phase two of this plan is to make our weekly menu based on what we get in our basket! 

Sunday we had friends over so we made Zuppa Toscana, the Olive Garden soup. It was tasty and impressive. We used potatoes in the soup, but other than that we didn't use any more of our produce.

Tonight we're having chicken salad (using celery and perhaps a bit of cucumber) on croissants and fruit salad (using bananas, strawberries, apples, grapes, cantaloupe, and some canned peaches).

Tuesday is Puttanesca with a fresh salad. I'll use the romaine, some corn, more cucumber, and possibly some celery.

Wednesday we're having chicken gravy with mashed potatoes, OR we're going to Aunt Marcy's for dinner!

Thursday we're having corn on the cob and German potato salad!

Friday or Saturday I'm making a vegetable chowder with potatoes, cauliflower, corn and anything else I can think up! I say Friday or Saturday because we don't know yet which day we're having our weekly date night. Whichever night isn't date night is chowder night!

Last Saturday I made my famous salsa with all of the tomatoes we had. We had it with quesadillas and a salad :)

We have most of the ingredients we're going to need already, and will probably only spend about $20 this week on groceries. That means our food costs for the entire week will be less than $50! So not only do we get to eat healthier, we also save a bunch of money!

This week was pretty easy to figure out recipes for, since most of the stuff we got in our basket was pretty familiar. Who knows what next week will bring? I don't know, but I hope it'll be fun!

Bountiful Baskets is rapidly opening new sites all over the US. Check their website to see if there's one near you! Contributions open today at 10am for Utah, and 12pm every other state, local time, and they close tomorrow night if you're interested :) Nathan and I have been very impressed with the amazing selection we've gotten two weeks in a row, so we'll definitely be signing up again.

I hope Day One was fun/interesting/informative! Leave comments for recipe ideas or other ways you know of to eat healthy for less money.