Delicioius Fresh Fruits and Vegetables, Anyone?

I participated for the first time in Bountiful Baskets after my fellow cop wife and good friend Kimber kept praising it. I also forgot to take a picture of my bounty, so here's her post since she's a lot more efficient than I am to actually take pictures of the goodness before putting it away and pulling up recipes.

Chris's biggest concern of doing Bountiful Baskets (which was a liable one, I grant him that) was that we don't know exactly what we're getting and it could go bad before we use it. I tried to prove to him earlier this week that I'll use what we get by finally doing something with all the oranges we had received from Christmas.

So, I grated a whole bunch of orange zest which I've frozen to sprinkle on things (we'll be having rice krispy treats for dessert tonight with orange zest on top!), then I squeezed all of them for juice, which took FOREVER and only resulted in, like, 2 cups from over 15 oranges, so I've hoarded that for myself since the kiddies won't appreciate all that hard work.

Lastly, I soaked the remainder of the orange peel in vinegar, put a little sugar in with it and cooked it in the crock pot for a day until the vinegar smell got too strong. The result?

Orange-infused vinegar that I'll put on salads! I now feel so resourceful (and who doesn't love the smell of fresh oranges in the house?) that I felt completely thrilled to get my basket Saturday, knowing I'd use the produce.

And oh, boy, will I! (Note: I pulled the pics below up on the internet)

Right when I got home, I cut up one of the bosc pears and had some colby jack cheese sticks with it (a lovely fruit and cheese platter like above would've been nice, especially brie, but I worked with what I had), enjoying the fresh snack that I saved so much money on!

Such as:

Fajitas with the orange peppers and red onions,

maybe this Greek dish with the spaghetti squash,

and onion soup from all the onions I now have.



Yum! On to some fresh cooking!