Market Day: You, Me, and $50 a Week at Clark Park (Updated)

Scrumptious. We rolled out of bed at 9:30 and went straight to the farmers' market at Clark Park (43rd & Baltimore).

Saturday Shopping List

3 lbs blue potatoes
quart of green beans
quart of fresh butter beans (Lima beans)
head of cauliflower
2 portabella caps
2 heirloom tomatoes and 5 other tomatoes
2 leeks
head of green leaf lettuce
4 yellow onions
4 ears bi-color sweet corn
4 peaches
4 Gala apples
jar of strawberry jam
1 loaf multi-grain bread
1 loaf sourdough bread
3 banana-chocolate muffins
2 brownies
catnip for the babies

Total spent: $52.03

That's a typical weekly grocery bill for us. Though we get different items each week as we run out of different things, over the months since we started shopping at the market back in April or May, the rotation has organically become staggered so that the bill usually works out about the same. The exception is when we make a drastic change in the kinds of things we're eating. When we discovered the brownies and chocolate-banana muffins from Slow Rise Bakery, for example, not to mention the half-dozen available varieties of bread (average $3/loaf), and the option of buying a giant hunk of banana sourdough bread and eating it for breakfast while you shop. Our weekly costs spiked right at that time. We got it under control (you can, after all, also have an apple for breakfast or one of the chocolate-banana muffins you are definitely going to buy anyway), and we still enjoy Slow Rise bread and a limited number of muffins each week and occasional brownies.



We shopped from seven local vendors. Here's the cost breakdown:

1. corn, $2
2. leeks, lettuce, and onions, $6.50 (and catnip, $2.50)
3. heirloom tomatoes, $2.25
4. peaches, tomatoes, and apples, $7.58
5. butter beans, blue potatoes, green beans, cauliflower, $13.20
6. portabella mushrooms and jam, $6
7. bread and chocolate, $12

We have more than enough vegetable scraps to do another batch of vegetable stock, and I still have Russet potatoes for another potato-leek soup. That's my favorite thing we've had recently. I can't believe how filling it is, but that's what you get from making your own vegetable stock and cashing in on all the nutrients in the vegetable scraps you were probably going to throw out.

The food is put away, and I want to figure out these pastry wraps and see what kinds of things I can stuff in there, maybe for lunch today.