A few years ago I was making green smoothies for breakfast every day. You know what green smoothies are: Lots of kale or spinach and lots of fruit crammed into one yogurt smoothie. It’s insanely healthy, but it’s also insanely expensive for a food you’re making at home.  So I started having oatmeal every day instead.

I basically eat this recipe every weekday at work. Since I have the day off, I was able to photograph it and bring it to you.  It is really delicious, and pretty frugal, but its true power lies in how filling it is. Oats, peanut butter, milk… Typically, I won’t be hungry for lunch after having this for breakfast.

Ingredients for PB Blueberry Oatmeal

I’ll explain you the recipe here, but it is pretty simple.

1. Pour the oats and milk in a bowl.  There should be enough milk to cover the oats.
2. Heat in a microwave for 60 seconds. Remove the bowl and stir.
3. Heat for another 30 seconds. Remove the bowl and stir.
4. Add the frozen blueberries. Heat for another 30 seconds. Now the oatmeal is hot and ready for your add-ins!
5. Break up the crunchy granola bar.** You’re going to need a hammer for this, goggles, and another person to spot you so you don’t get injured. Make sure your goggles are on tight so nothing gets in your eyes. Grip the hammer firmly in your hand and bring it down hard on the granola bar. You can hold one end of the granola bar with your other hand, but make sure not to bring the hammer down on your fingers! I’ve broken the same finger twice while doing this and it’s going to look weird and angular for the rest of my life. This part is difficult, but believe me, it will be worth it.
6. Repeatedly smash the granola bar with your hammer. Soon chunks of it will begin coming off. This whole process should take no more than ten minutes. Once the granola bar is completely broken down, put the chunks into the oatmeal.
7. Mix the peanut butter and granola chunks into the hot oatmeal so the peanut butter gets all melty and delicious.

Oh man, this is good. It’s like eating a big undercooked peanut butter and oatmeal cookie for breakfast! The cheapo granola bars add a nice crunch. Too bad blueberries are so expensive. I use the expensive “wild” blueberries from Wyman’s. With the blueberries, I give this breakfast a 7.5.

Without the blueberries, it’s still good, but it’s more like a big sticky mess and I don’t feel so good about eating it. Blueberries are a superfood, you know.  However, without blueberries the cost per serving drops to 55 cents, our cheapest recipe yet! Without blueberries, I’d rate it a 5.5.

Deliciousness Rating: 7.5

(Where 1 is gross, 5 is good, and 10 is Captain Parker’s clam chowder)

The standings so far:

* The stated deliciousness of each recipe is solely the opinion of the author. Cost is objective, but your tastes may vary.

** Omitting steps 5 and 6 and crumbling the granola bar with your fingers is allowed.

The post Cost Per Serving: PB Blueberry Oatmeal appeared first on RidinKulous.

Chinchero is a beautiful little Peruvian town, so far not ruined by tourism, at the leg-wobbling elevation of 12,500 feet, located in between Cusco and Urubamba. We took a day trip from Cusco to Chinchero on a Sunday to see the famous Chinchero market. There are market days throughout the week, but Sunday is their big day when you can buy a little bit of everything: Clothing, textiles, handicrafts, and lots of food.

I was mostly interested in going to see the local women. I think the women of the Andes are the best-dressed people in the world. They all wear hats, skirts and aren’t afraid of color and patterns. The hats are some kind of holdover from the 1950s, when these businesswomen would wear them to work at the market. Imagine if men wearing hats with suits never went out of style in America. That’s basically what happened in the Andes.

We ended up buying a few scarves from the ladies in traditional dress you see in the photo. And we bought produce as well! The tomatoes looked good, so we bought a few, and ate them like apples.  Believe me when I say these were the best tomatoes I’ve had in a long, long time. Red all the way through and delicious. Unless you get your tomatoes from a local farm, I find the tomatoes you get in stores to always be white, tasteless, mealy, or some combination of those. And best of all? It cost one sole for 3 tomatoes. One sole is about 33 cents, making each tomato about 11 cents!

What!

We decided to buy some more delicious produce despite not having access to any cooking facilities. Aside from the tomatoes, at the market you could buy a giant avocado for one sole (33 cents) or three limes for the same. So we came back to Cusco with the haul below, and bought an unidentifiable spice packet at store in Cusco.

Chinchero veggies plus offensive spice packet

At our inn’s breakfast table the next morning, we made a simple mix of tomatoes, avocado and lime juice, and added the weird spice packet for some saltiness. It would’ve been a little better with some onion, but it was still delicious. The avocados were big, too, not like teensy California avocados, so we only needed half an avocado in each dish, and gave the leftover vegetables to someone else at the inn.

As far as the cost goes, this really isn’t fair to compare to dishes made in the US. Clearly, if you like good food and not spending much money, you can live very well in Peru. Making this identical dish in upstate NY would probably run you over $2.00**, and it wouldn’t taste as good.

Deliciousness Rating: 8
(Where 1 is gross, 5 is good, and 10 is Manolo’s chocolate con churros)

The standings so far:

Extras:

Have a recipe you think is cheap and delicious? Send it to me and I’ll eat it! – norm@ridinkulous.net –

* The stated deliciousness of each recipe is solely the opinion of the author. Cost is objective, but your tastes may vary.

 ** Right now, avocados cost about $1.19 right now, just okay tomatoes are $1.49/lb at best, and limes are 50 cents each.

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Hey everybody. It’s Norm’s birthday today! Whadja get me? Something good I hope! Didja set a place at the table for me, too?  Whatya makin’ for dinner? To celebrate my birthday, every home in America sets a table for me, and even puts a plate of food out in my honor! It doesn’t matter if I’m showing up or not. It’s just to celebrate the holiday! And if I do show up for dinner, you’re all set!

Well, in our house, you get to eat whatever you want on your birthday. For me, the past few years have been fried chicken and hot pastrami sandwiches. For Marge, it’s usually sushi. And this year, I felt like pulled pork with cornbread and coleslaw!  There are some good barbeque joints around here, but I’m being honest when I say that no one makes pulled pork as good as mine. This is just an undeniable fact of life. Mine is the best.  And you can’t have pulled pork without…

Homemade Barbeque Sauce!

Yes, today I’m taking this opportunity to take Cost Per Serving in a different direction. Today we won’t be looking at a meal, but at something you could make at home instead of buying it in a store, and we’ll see how the cost compares.

If you don’t make your own barbeque sauce, this is going to change your life. If you’re buying barbeque sauce at the store, I feel sad for you. I don’t care how fancy the graphics are on the label, no packaged barbeque sauce will be as perfectly seasoned as the one you make yourself. I’ve been making this recipe for almost ten years, and people always compliment it. Let’s see how the cost stacks up…

The finished product

Figuring out a cost per serving proves a little difficult. I can tell you that this recipe filled up my original 64 oz ketchup bottle, a quart Ball jar, and a 3 cup Ziploc container. That means it makes 120 ounces.  It looks like most bottles of commercial BBQ sauce are 18 oz. If our homemade sauce were bottled like that, it would be…

$2.80 a bottle

Based on local prices, this puts it right in between the store brand BBQ sauce and Stubb’s, $1.89 and $3.89 respectively.  So not as cheap as the cheapest barbeque sauce, but much better than all of them.

The recipe comes from AllRecipes.com. There are a lot of ingredients, but the cooking is pretty simple. Sautee the onions and garlic in the bourbon whiskey for ten minutes, then add everything else and let it simmer. The only changes I make to the AllRecipes version is that I add more hot sauce than they recommend (I use Frank’s) and I also cook it for waaay longer. They say 20 minutes, but I usually let mine simmer for two hours or more so it thickens up more. The end result is thick and tangy, sweet, smoky and spicy. Everything you could want.

You might think that’s a lot of bourbon whiskey. It sure adds a lot of cost, I can tell you that. But the alcohol mostly evaporates and leaves extra umami.  For your version, you can taste the sauce as you’re cooking and add or change whatever you want. If you want more tang, add more cider vinegar. More sweet, add more sugar, although I think this recipe is plenty sweet.  But remember the spices and such will probably be more pronounced after it’s been sitting for a while.

Deliciousness Rating: 9

The normal Cost Per Serving rankings don’t apply in this case, because no one makes a meal out of barbeque sauce, so I’ll start a separate table here.

Here are the normal Cost Per Serving standings so far:

Have a recipe you think is cheap and delicious? Send it to me and I’ll eat it! – norm@ridinkulous.net –

* The stated deliciousness of each recipe is solely the opinion of the author. Cost is objective, but your tastes may vary.

The post Cost Per Serving: Homemade Barbeque Sauce appeared first on RidinKulous.

You know what they say. You can’t control something without measuring it first. In view of trying to reduce our food costs, I will be comprehensively calculating the cost per serving of various recipes. And not only that, but I will be rating their deliciousness!*

I had an odd craving last week for cod chowder. Maybe it had to do with mentioning Captain Parker’s delicious clam chowder in the inaugural edition of Cost Per Serving, Garden Vegetable Stew. I can’t recall ever making cod chowder, but I’m sure I’ve had it before. It is a very New England-y dish.

Okay, technically I don’t know if that is cod below. It was being sold as “chowder mix” and just as easily could have been haddock. This is another trick that supermarkets play. The less pretty bits get cut off the filet and sold as some sort of inferior product. But you and I know better! You and I know that only suckers buy the expensive, flat smoked salmon! We buy smoked salmon trim for half the price!

Cod chowder ingredients

And here’s the recipe!

I reduced the recipe by half, and added a cup of frozen corn, since that’s a very chowder-y ingredient and helps bring the cost down by stretching a fifth serving out of the recipe. But other than that, made no alterations. I have to say, this was a very standard recipe. If you like seafood chowder, this fits the bill. Nothing special, and very little spice (I probably quadrupled the amount of Old Bay seasoning recommended). But I’m a seafood fan, so this hit the spot, and is nice in the winter.

On the down side, it’s not extremely frugal, although compared to other fish recipes probably is rather frugal.

Deliciousness Rating: 7
(Where 1 is gross, 5 is good, and 10 is crunchy cookie butter)

* The stated deliciousness of each recipe is solely the opinion of the author. Cost is objective, but your tastes may vary.

The post Cost Per Serving: Cod Chowder appeared first on RidinKulous.

If you’re like me, and I think I’ll just assume that you are, you’re desperate to know what the true cost of your home-cooked meals are. That is, how much does the hamburger you made cost? How much is the slice of lasagna? How much for each square of chocolate? Only through measurement can we maximize the frugality of the foods we enjoy! And vice-versa!

I’ve tried to come up with spreadsheets that would calculate meal costs based on how many of a given ingredient you used, and the going price for those ingredients, but it quickly gets overwhelming. Some recipes use cup measurements, some use a quantity of items, and some morons use weight.  So it’s hard to compare.

So once in a while here, I’m going to make a recipe, take all the costs involved, divide it into servings, and then rank them as I go.

BUT WHAT’S A SERVING? Is it ever what the recipe says? No, never! Originally I was going to include calorie counts and divide all recipes into 650 calorie meals, but even that ended up being inaccurate, because today’s recipe in particular has, like, no calories in it, but filled four bowls.  I guess the best way is to see how many meals it makes for us, and divide by that.

Today’s meal is garden vegetable stew. I took it out of Food & Wine magazine, and it doesn’t appear to be online, but this one is very similar. Food & Wine sometimes repeat themselves.

Here’s what went into it:

Ingredients for garden vegetable stew

Even though the recipe recommended vegetable broth, the broth you see here is chicken since I’ve been having a heck of a time finding cheap vegetable broth (only the Polish market seems to stock it, pun intended). Also, I took out two whole fennels because I’m not a fan, and they’re 2 bucks each. You might notice the lemon juice in the photo. The recipe included, like, 1 tablespoon of lemongrass, which of course I didn’t have. Whenever a recipe calls for a small bit of some obscure ingredient, I invariably substitute something stupid I have around instead of buying a whole new jar just to get a teaspoon of something.

You know what would also be cool here? A deliciousness rating, so we can maximize our eating enjoyment while reducing costs. I think of this now because this recipe didn’t really float my boat. It’s weird, with it’s orange-y fennel broth and insubstantial vegetables. But it sure is healthy, and that should probably count for something, I guess.

Deliciousness Rating: 4
(Where 1 is gross, 5 is good, and 10 is Captain Parker’s clam chowder in Yarmouth, MA)

Here are the rankings so far!

Do you like fennel? You ever put orange juice in soup?

The post Cost Per Serving: Garden Vegetable Stew appeared first on RidinKulous.

This week’s recipe shares some qualities with the rice and beans recipe of two weeks ago. Sub out the black beans with green peppers, and replace mushrooms with eggplant and celery and you’re basically there. The recipe calls for baking at the end so it’s more of a casserole, which I think helps its frugality by inflating those cheap rice grains even more. I think it turned out pretty good.

Incredibly, this time Food & Wine has seen fit to publish the recipe online, so I don’t have to tell you to just guess at how the dish is made!

This is basically your New Orleans style “dirty rice” with eggplant added. I love eggplant, but don’t use green peppers that often, so this was a good opportunity to use them.  Green peppers are normally outshined by their more expensive cousin the red bell pepper.

But wait, did I say cousin? No, they’re actually not related… because they’re the same pepper! A red bell pepper is just a ripened green pepper. Over years, peppers have been bred to stay red for longer in storage, since that is the pepper color and taste consumers are craving so. Green peppers are more bitter and harder to find a good use for in recipes. Hence its use here in flavorful dirty rice.

There are other spices in this besides thyme, but the amounts were so miniscule, I didn’t include them in the cost. Slightly tastier than the rice and beans of two weeks ago, but similarly needing an additional shot of Frank’s hot sauce or Sriracha.

Deliciousness Rating: 7
(Where 1 is gross, 5 is good, and 10 is cookie butter)

The standings so far:

* The stated deliciousness of each recipe is solely the opinion of the author. Cost is objective, but your tastes may vary.

The post Cost Per Serving: Eggplant Dirty Rice appeared first on RidinKulous.

Every culture has their version of cheap eats, and like my people, the Irish, the Russians’ staple cheap food is potatoes. A big pot of plain mashed potatoes might be one of the cheapest things you could eat. But I don’t even want to calculate the cost of that, because it would make me depressed… because that’s what terrorists eat.

This recipes mixes the potatoes up with some other root vegetables, peas, and some more Eastern European favorites, sauerkraut and pickles. Let’s see how it shapes up cost wise.

Ingredients for Vitamin Salad

Just as I expected, the beets really drove the price. I wish beets were as cheap as potatoes. Why aren’t they? I also realize now that we get all of our pickles from Marge’s grandfather, who makes them himself. So those are free pickles you’re looking at! To get the cost for the Average Joe who does not have a Pickle Grandfather, I used a big jar of store brand pickles from the grocery store.

This recipe was in the newspaper about a year ago.  The recipe is not online, but you can read the accompanying article about the cook, Julia Popova.  You might be asking yourself, why does her food look normal and my version looks radioactive pink? It’s probably due to One Weird Trick I employed, where I switched out the olive oil for Fake Miracle Whip. Don’t even think about knocking Fake Miracle Whip in the comments. I already know what you’re going to say.

The featured picture doesn’t show the finished dish’s full pinkness, so I’ll post that now. Put on your sunglasses…

MY EYES!

You might also notice that the ingredients photo shows olive oil, but my ingredients lists Fake Miracle Whip. I took the picture before I realized that Fake Miracle Whip would be my preferred, er, lubrication for a meal like this.

The recipe isn’t that difficult. Basically, you boil the carrots, beets, and potatoes until they are all tender. Beets should be on the bottom of the pot, potatoes above that, and carrots on top, so they all finish around the same time. After those are cooked, you chop them up, and add the other ingredients, chopping up the pickles and onions along the way. Then you throw in a few gobs of Miracle Whip, or as I prefer, knockoff Miracle Whip.

It was lacking in flavor, though. It was definitely healthy, but since most of the vegetables are boiled, they are not super flavorful themselves, except maybe the beets, and you get a lot of sour saltiness from the sauerkraut and pickles.

Deliciousness Rating: 5
(Where 1 is gross, 5 is good, and 10 is THE BEST FOOD EVER)

The standings so far:

Have a recipe you think is cheap and delicious? Send it to me and I’ll eat it! – norm@ridinkulous.net –

* The stated deliciousness of each recipe is solely the opinion of the author. Cost is objective, but your tastes may vary.

The post Cost Per Serving: Vitamin Salad appeared first on RidinKulous.

My god, it’s been three months since the last installment, Chocolate Babka. And what do we have today but yet another chocolate dessert! What does that say about me? That I only eat things made out of chocolate? That may be true. But don’t judge me! You don’t know me!

Today’s recipe comes from Food & Wine magazine. My Great British Bake-Off-inspired run of baking attempts led me to buy a tart dish, and this was my first time using it. If you’re not familiar with a tart dish, its top feature is a removable bottom that allows you to lift the tart out of its pan after its cooked, resulting in a lovely free-standing baked good.

This was also my first time ever “candying” fruit,  so there was a couple new fun things to try.  Here’s the recipe: Bittersweet Chocolate Tart with Candied Oranges.

Ingredients for Bittersweet Chocolate Tart, oranges candying on the stove

Naked chocolate tart still in the pan

Wowee! Another expensive dessert! Just like the babka, it’s that chocolate that controls the cost. The chocolate is half of the cost here. Would I pay over $11.00 for this in a store? Probably not. And yet, here I am paying that much to make it myself. Strange how that happens sometimes. Weird how I would pay $1.42 for a slice at a restaurant.

Oh well, so it’s not the most cost effective dessert. It is super attractive, so I could see making this for a party to impress people. I think the dark chocolate and candied oranges make it look all fancy-like.

Actually, this is a very delicious recipe. Cooking the oranges in the syrup made the bitter peel especially addicting. The crust has a more cookie-like crumb than a pie dough. And the chocolate is, obviously, yum-yum.

The only problem is the oranges themselves. Though those wide sections of oranges look attractive on the tart, you can’t just cut through them with a fork. Pre-choppng them would make it easier to eat, but wouldn’t look as good.

Deliciousness Rating: 8
(Where 1 is gross, 5 is good, and 10 is )

The normal Cost Per Serving rankings don’t apply in this case, so here’s my extra table.

And here are the normal Cost Per Serving standings so far:

Have a recipe you think is cheap and delicious? Send it to me and I’ll eat it!Norm@gmail.com –

* The stated deliciousness of each recipe is solely the opinion of the author. Cost is objective, but your tastes may vary.

The post Cost Per Serving: Bittersweet Chocolate Tart with Candied Oranges appeared first on RidinKulous.

But Marge said, “Those can’t be good. You should try making them yourself.” And suddenly I had a revelation. I should try to make them myself! Why hadn’t I thought of that? I’ve probably eaten hundreds of granola bars of spurious nutrition over the years. It was such a routine buying them that I had never thought of it.

So I googled for homemade granola bars and went with literally the first result: The 5 Ingredient Granola Bar from Minimalist Baker. I made it once, and they were good, but I came up with some changes to make them much cheaper, and (almost) just as healthy.

Recipe

• 1 13 oz. package of baking dates
• 1/3 cup maple syrup
• 1/2 cup peanut butter
• 1 cup unsalted almonds, chopped
• 3 1/2 cups of quick oats

1. Toast your oats and almonds in a 350 degree oven for 10-15 minutes.
2. Put oats, almonds, and dates in mixing bowl. Break up the dates.
3. Put peanut butter and maple syrup in a small pot over low heat, and mix until combined in a mapley peanutty sauce.
4. Pour maple and peanut butter sauce over the oats, almonds, and dates and mix together. You’re allowed to use your hands from here on out because the mixture gets dense.
5. Line a small baking dish with parchment paper and transfer the mix into it.
6. Press until the mix fills out the whole dish. Using the bottom of a glass, wet with water, helps to flatten it.
7. Put in the fridge for 30 minutes.
8. Cut into your favorite granola bar size. Store in the fridge for safe keeping, but I’ve found they will keep outside the fridge for 4 or 5 days if you don’t like eating cold granola bars.

I have to say, this recipe won me over. These bars were dense, tasted good, seemed healthy, and definitely filled me up in a way that store-bought bars don’t. But the real question is, “Is it worth the work?” Is it really cheaper than buying a box?

I used to think granola bars were one of those things were super cheap because of economies of scale. Like, they make so many of them and they seem so cheap, surely these businesses must not be making much money on them. Now I’m not so sure.

Cost

The main difference between my recipe and the original is that Minimalist Baker used snacking dates and processed them into a pulp. Little do they know, apparently, that snacking dates cost four times more than baking dates! ($2.79 for 8 oz.) Plus you have to do the extra work of processing them!  Baking dates are already in a paste ready to use. They are available in our grocer’s international aisle and are one of those items I’ve always walked by without thinking twice about.

In reality, actually our maple syrup was free since Marge’s grandparents give us maple syrup when we visit. They have a connect in the maple syrup world. But if we had to purchase maple syrup, we would buy only the best, the real stuff. In large quantities to bring down the price per ounce.

The other changes I made to the original recipe was to double it, half the amount of almonds, increase the oats a little bit, and cut the maple syrup a little. These are sweet bars. We also experimented with using sriracha-spiced almonds and those added a nice different flavor dimension.

But anyway… forty-four cents per bar! (It comes out to 33 cents per bar with free maple syrup!) And not only that, but these bars are calorie dense in a way that store-bought bars can only dream of. Truly, these bars are more like a meal replacement than a snack. Check this out…

Calorie Count

That’s almost 400 calories per bar. More store-bought bars are around 150 calories. Other nutritional fun facts:

• 6.4 grams of fiber per bar (32% of Daily Value)
• 9 grams of protein per bar (9% of Daily Value)
• 28 grams of sugar per bar

I guess you can see the one drawback nutritionally. That is a lot of sugar! At least it’s coming from natural sources (the maple syrup, but mostly the dates) and not a nutritionally bankrupt source like corn syrup.

By making these in bulk and using them as a meal replacement, I almost feel like I’m making my own Soylent. I can see the same people who drink Soylent keeping big stashes of bars like these and trying to life off of them.

Have any DIY revelations lately? Have a favorite granola recipe you’d like to share?

Link to Cost Per Serving Series

* The stated deliciousness of each recipe is solely the opinion of the author. Cost is objective, but your tastes may vary.

The post Cost Per Serving: Improved 5 Ingredient Granola Bars appeared first on RidinKulous.

We’ve even done a CSA in the past, where you pick up a weekly box of produce from a local farm that you pay for in advance at the beginning of the season. (Think hundreds and hundreds of dollars) But I’m basically opposed to goods-by-mail subscriptions services. That includes clothes, razors, snacks, socks, ties, and all other manner of “lifestyle” crap you can get delivered to your door by a company that is hoping you’ll forget to cancel your subscription.

What makes Misfit Market different is that they take the produce that supermarkets don’t want (think the ugly, misshapen stuff) box it up and send it out to you. Plus it’s all organic. And since the they can’t sell it at regular grocery store prices, it comes at a significant discount! So not only is this delivering something you need anyway (food), but it is helping keep food from going into the trashcan! (Insert rant about food waste in America here) When I found out that they started shipping to the Albany area, I signed right up.

We signed up for the Mischief Box, which is supposed to be enough for two people. It should have 10-12 pounds of produce in it. We signed up for bi-weekly deliveries. With a 25% off coupon, our first delivery was $19.50 with shipping, and subsequent boxes have been $23.50.

It was exciting getting that first box. Unlike meal delivery kits, you don’t know what you’re going to get from Misfit Market. You can go on the website and get an idea, but you won’t know for sure until you open the box! Some people might not like this aspect because there’s food they won’t eat, or they like to plan meals ahead. But for us, the surprise is a plus. We will probably eat anything, and we like to use our creativity to use up everything in the box.

The boxes of vegetables are very well packaged. The cardboard box has some kind of insulating lining that is biodegradable, and usually the vegetables are packaged as you’d get them at the grocery store. Here’s what we got!

Week 1

What a haul! Here’s what it would cost for us to buy the same things at conventional produce prices at the grocery store, as close as I can guess.

Two baby bok choy ($6.00), 8 oz of grape tomatoes ($2.00), a head of lettuce ($2.49), four pears ($3.00), four russet potatoes ($1.00), four poblano peppers ($2.50), five carrots ($1.00), two cucumbers ($1.60), lacinato kale ($3.00), two onions ($1.00), two lemons ($1.00), four oranges ($2.00), two onions ($1.00), one head of garlic ($0.69), and one romanesco cauliflower (our grocery store doesn’t even have this, so I’ll round up from a regular cauliflower and say $4.00).

That’s $32.28 if we had bought this as conventionally grown produce at the store! And remember, Misfit Market only stocks organic produce, so figure another 40% premium for organic, and you’re close to $45.00 worth of produce!

Week 2

A little lighter this week. Four pears ($3.00), 8 oz. of grape tomatoes ($2.00), three turnips ($2.00), two small butternut squash ($4.00), a bunch of carrots ($1.50) , a beet ($3.00), two avocados ($2.40), four summer squash ($2.00), swiss chard ($2.50).

One bad thing about the second week’s haul? That beet SUCKED. Honestly, I don’t know what it was, but it was one of the worst vegetables I’ve ever had. It tasted like salt and dirt after we roasted it. I don’t know what was up with it, but the beets we got the next week tasted fine.

At any rate, that is $22.40 worth of conventional produce by my calculations. And probably $30 or so if we were buying organic at the grocery store.

Week 3

Four apples ($3.00), 8 oz. grape tomatoes ($2.00), two smaller beets ($4.00), two cucumbers ($1.60), an eggplant ($2.00), a celeriac ($3.00), three oranges ($1.50), two orange peppers ($2.50), and a five carrots with the tops ($1.50).

Boy, they love giving away grape tomatoes! The price I come up with is $21.10 for this box, or $30.00 for organic. Too bad I didn’t think of taking photos of the meals we made, huh? The beets got roasted, the celeriac went into a soup with leek, the cucumbers went into lunch salads…

Week 4

Four small potatoes ($1.00), two oranges ($1.00), savoy cabbage ($2.00), three pears ($2.25), one mango ($1.50), two broccoli ($3.00), grape tomatoes ($2.00), ONE PARSNIP (idk 25 cents?), a leek ($2.50), a European cucumber ($1.80), collard greens ($2.70), and another five carrots with the tops ($1.50).

The total on this one is $21.50, or $30.00 organic. Seeing a theme here? Most of these are turning out to be close to the shipping price of $23.50, although I am erring on the conservative side with the price estimates. But yeah, the first box seemed to be heavier than the rest. I thought they might be doing that on purpose to get you all excited for your new subscription service, but another reviewer on YouTube said their boxes fluctuated a lot.

But I have to say, I recommend Misfit Market. I might be preaching to a limited audience here, because according to their website, they only deliver to the northeast now (April 2019). So if you live anywhere south or west of Pennsylvania or New Jersey, you are basically out of luck. Maybe there’s something like this in your neck of the woods. You can sign up for e-mail alerts on their website to find out when they deliver in your area.

I have a coupon code for 25% I could give you to use… but I won’t! Just to be clear, this isn’t some paid advertisement. I really love this service and think a lot of you all would, too. You can find a 25% off coupon somewhere else on the web.

Any subscription services you’ve been enjoying?

The post Misfit Market Cost Analysis And Review: Is It Worth It? appeared first on RidinKulous.