A New Arrival

I was pretty ridiculously excited for my SPUD box to arrive today (a day later than I originally thought).

Here it is:

I've got milk, fresh spreadable cheese, bartlett pears, asian pears, onions, leeks, red potatoes, pear juice, sunchokes, and raisin bread.

Here's my bill:


You can see on it where things came from and SPUD's tally of the distance my food travelled from its last producer.

My thoughts:

1) Yey I have more local food!
2) Mmm bread, but I still don't know where all the ingredients came from so I feel a bit guilty
3) Too bad so much of it came in plastic bags (although biodegradeable, I still want to cut back, perhaps I'll put them back in the bin with a note asking them to reuse them next time?)
4) I have more to eat, but what am I going to make? Potato-leek soup? That sounds pretty good.
5) How do I cook a sunchoke?
6) I wonder how much all of this would have cost had I gotten it at the store? I don't think much more, and SPUD has a tool on their site that helps you estimate savings when you take into account mileage saved and such (saving the time is a big bonus for me). Also, if $40 worth of groceries works out to be the bulk of my food spending for the week I don't think this is too bad. I'm going to try to keep track of all my expenses over the next while to see how it works out. I aim to spend at very max $400/month on food. You have to consider though that I'm largely eating things right now that I bought a long time ago, that are just sitting in my kitchen and need to be eaten up (squashes, potatoes, cheese, rice, salad etc).

Well if any readers know of good sunchoke recipes please let me know. It will be the first I've tried them! (Hope they are yummy. I have no idea really)