Today I did my vegetable shopping for Pesach.  The store was very crowded and I was exhausted when I came home.  But I’ll never fail to be anything but enthusiastic about this store’s delivery service- the more I buy, the happier it makes me to know that someone else is bringing it into my house instead of me.

I took the picture below so you can see the amount of vegetables a family our size buys for Pesach, and why I’m happy not to have to bring it up a flight of stairs.  🙂  (You’ll probably need to double click it to see it up close to realize how much is there since the boxes contain so much of it – my kids saw the picture and all said, ‘that doesn’t look like so much!)  To be clear: this is not what bulk shopping looks like for us – that would be way, way more!

Here’s what I got, from the top left, clockwise to the right.  My receipt is in kg, so if you mentally want to convert the numbers I list, a kilogram is 2.2 pounds.

• first box, top left – three 10 kg bags of carrots (last week we blew through one of these in 2.5 days)
• box to the right of carrots (fruit box)- 16 kg oranges
• two kg strawberries
• 3 kg melon
• 1 kg apples
• (next box to the right – green leafy vegetables) – 4 huge heads of romaine lettuce
• 3 bunches of fresh parsley
• 1 bunch of fresh mint
• (to the right slightly down) – 2 large sacks of potatoes (can’t remember how many kg is in each one – I think 18 or 20) – I actually have three sacks but started putting things away before I took the picture and didn’t want to drag it back out
• (to left of potatoes) 10 kg cucumbers
• 4.5 kg beets
• 250 grams fresh garlic
• 200 grams horseradish root
• (next box to left) -5.5 kg  kohlrabi
• 2.5 kg fennel
• 7 kg cauliflower
• 3.5 kg green cabbage
• 2.5 kg red cabbage
• (bags to the left) 8 kg onions
• 12 kg red and orange peppers (also another bag in a different box)
• 15 kg tomatoes
• 1.5 kg radishes
• (center right) 12 kg avocados

I also have a box of turnips and some zucchini left from last week’s shopping (which are only left because no one snacks on them, unlike almost everything else).  Since we watched Hungry for Change last week, dd17 and ds13 are eating only/mostly raw (dd17 0nly, ds13 mostly) and you should see how we’re burning through the vegetables!  Also when the weather gets warm, we eat more fresh salads with our meals instead of cooked vegetables that are part of a soup or dish.  It’s a good thing, but it’s not cheap to drastically up your vegetable intake for a family our size.  On Friday afternoon I spent almost 300 shekels on vegetables – it was four boxes full – and on Sunday afternoon almost everything was gone.  Usually that amount can last for a week.  The amount in the picture would usually be enough for two weeks, but for Pesach we use a lot more fresh produce.  As it is, I’ll have to be a bit restrictive of the kids because they love fresh produce and would be happy to snack their way through most of what I got (even raw kohlrabi – they really like it!)

I didn’t get as much fruit as I would have liked, but I was spending so much for Pesach that I felt I needed to be more careful in this area.  I’ve spent half of our monthly allotted food budget so far just for this coming week, plus there are a number of expenses due to not having any Pesach supplies (dishes, pots, silverware, etc) here.  To be fair, I also got more grape juice, extra virgin olive oil and palm oil than I need for the week or even the month, since they’re on sale now.  This is something I always try to do, be sure I have money available to buy staple items when they are on sale.  (You can see in the background of the above picture a couple of boxes with some of those other miscellaneous things – a sink insert and electric hot water pot are on top, some disposable dishes and non perishable food items are underneath.)

For the first time ever, we kashered three pots that we use during the year as well as our silverware, and though it was a lot of work to get the bottoms of the pots spotless, it was nice that I didn’t have to buy these things!  We also kashered a stainless steel salad bowl and a couple of serving utensils.  An additional benefit of kashering these things is that it minimizes the storage space I’ll need for Pesach items for the rest of the year – I’ll just go back to using them during the year.

Now I need to go back out and do some more shopping for the things I couldn’t get this morning –  I ran out of energy after the three stores I went to (the vegetables were just one stop).  So I’m going to rest for a short bit and then go spend more money.  🙂

Avivah