This Week’s Menu: Occasionally Organic

I used to be a bit more fanatic about buying organic foods, but these days . . . not so much.

The biggest factor to buying organic here is, quite simply, the cost. Like most places, organic food costs more and along with other higher prices here sometimes the extra expense for organic just isn’t worth it, especially these days when we’re saving for something big. For example, I used to only purchase organic chicken, but now just go with regular. We don’t buy organic bread any more because we just don’t eat very much of it these days. The bread from Costco’s bakery is fine.

Still, there are several items where we stick to organic, or at least make an effort:

• Fruit: We buy organic whenever we can, especially apples, and berries. I wish we could get organic peaches and melons during the summer, but they’re just not available here unless we want to turn over our bank account and our first-born.
• Vegetables: We always choose organic if possible at Costco, and their frozen vegetables are nearly always organic. The farmers we buy from at the market do not raise their crops organically, but they don’t use pesticides either.
• Eggs: Costco sells two dozen organic eggs from the mainland at an affordable price, so we’ve stuck with these even though ‘regular’ eggs are cheaper. Sometimes Costco has local eggs for sale – talk about expensive!
• Soy milk: We don’t use regular milk any more (Brett’s allergic and YaYu is lactose intolerant), and Costco’s soy milk is organic. Easy peasy.
• Meat: We do buy organic chicken breasts (they come frozen), but a package will last us for three to four months so the cost gets spread out a bit. When we buy other meat or meat products (like sausages and bacon) we try to purchase those with no added nitrites, additives or other preservatives. Again, we spend a little more but prefer to know we’re not getting that stuff. We could buy organic ground beef at Costco, but we like to buy grass-fed beef these days from local ranchers for about the same price.
• Miscellaneous: We still buy organic tofu, flour, butter, soup, sugar, peanut butter, and some snacks.

Anyway, we’re not as devoted to organics these days, but we do our best as well as continuing to try to eat as clean as possible while sticking to our budget.

Here’s what we’re having for dinner this week:

• Tuesday (this evening): Grilled Italian sausages; stuffed tomatoes; grilled zucchini
• Wednesday: Oyakodon (no rice for me); edamame
• Thursday: Slow cooker chicken with rice soup; bread (I’ll serve my portion before adding the rice)
• Friday: Leftovers – last cross country spaghetti dinner for state finalists
• Saturday: Grilled Polish sausages; onion rings; coleslaw (no onion rings for me)
• Sunday: Chinese stir-fried tomatoes and eggs; rice; cucumbers (I’m skipping the rice)
• Monday: Grilled teriyaki chicken; zaru soba (zoodles for me); edamame

We’ll be picking up carrots, cucumbers, papaya and whatever else catches our eye this week. We still have edamame left over from a couple of weeks ago (it keeps well in the fridge). We bought some beautiful tomatoes on the vine at Costco last week, so will be using those up this week.

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