Up till now, I've not really gotten into buying organic food aside from our weekly fruit and vege box.
The only things I do currently buy are peanut butter, raisins and tamari sauce (because it's also gluten free).
But, I've recently joined up to a co-op with some local mums. Today we met - and in a house of chaos and mayhem (with about a dozen mums and about the same number of kids) we went through the product list including what we wanted. By buying through a co-op we are able to buy the goods at the trade price.
I'm sure I came away with a lot more than I had in mind when I went there lol.
I am particularly excited about getting into organic dairy products - we ordered a 25kg block of butter, and one of cheese to be divied out amongst us.
Along with a variety of other goods, I have also ordered myself 6 x 3kg tins of tomatoes (I will open one tin at a time and freeze in smaller portion sizes). I'm hoping those will last me through till my summer crops are reading for harvesting.
8 comments:
This is so exciting. I would love to hear how it gets on as it is just the sort of thing I'd love to do.
Cool! I really like your idea of the bulk canned tomatoes, and might try that.
If you want any thoughts on butter cutting a 25 kg block - happy to share our experiences - although it will be more along the lines of 'what NOT to do'! :o)
Great! I belonged to an organic coop when I lived in Porirua, but it faded away slowly. Really miss the produce though. How long has this coop been running, do you know? Are they open to any new members? :-)
Johanna, YES please do share your experiences of what to do (and what NOT to do lol).
Lynda, this is only the 2nd month of the co-op, but they are taking new people, so I will email the organiser and get you on the email list to come along to next months meeting (I didn't know anyone there except for the friend who introduced me to it lol).
Sounds great. Thanks Nikki !
Okay, cutting butter :o) ...
On the whole, cold days seem better than warm days! In bulk, cold butter is easier to cut and divide than slimy warm butter ...
Make sure you have some really reliable scales. The first time we did it, the scales must have been slightly inaccurate - caused no end of trouble when trying to divvy up people's portions fairly.
You need a really enormous, very strong knife - or something even better. (I guess there must be industrial strength butter or cheese cutters you can get, which would be cool ...?)
Both times we tried home-made wire cutters, they broke within minutes. Again, there may be a way to make them work ... just haven't found it.
Unless you find a way to cut much more evenly and controlledly than we did (a chainsaw??) you probably need to resign yourself to everyone having a random-looking collection of irregular chunks of butter - rather than neat and tidy, consistently sized blocks ...
Wrapping in brown paper, baking paper, or gladwrap works.
It seems to take us about two hours to do - that's with one person cutting, and another person weighing, divvying up, and wrapping. (With occasional short breaks, and some discussion before and after)
Maybe nothing very useful there ... but fwiw!
How many in your co-op? Is it few enough that everyone will get enough butter to freeze some?
Thanks Johanna! Very useful - I was wondering what to wrap in. They had only allocated 3 people to split the entire order (over 12 families so a lot of food) - so I'm thinking, because of the butter, it would be better to have another couple of people to work on that.
I ordered 2kg for myself, so yep, I'll freeze it and that should last me a month. But would certainly take more if they needed more taken to fill the order.
I'd love to hear how it goes. Let us know if you make any breakthroughs - technique or technology wise! Would love any new ideas or advice that we could implement ourselves next time!
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