Back in the day (six years ago) I used to have a food blog called Healthy Kitchen, Healthy Budget. I started it after my second son was born and I was doing the career/two kids juggle (still doing that!) I wanted to document how I was making homemade meals/snacks using good for us ingredients, without breaking the bank. At the time, I didn’t think there was much in the blogsphere in terms of how to eat healthy and organic AND stay within a decent budget. I don’t know what’s available now, who knows maybe someone is doing the same thing (and not sleeping much!)
Although I let that blog expire when I started a side business with Beautycounter, paying extra attention to what we’re eating, and how much we’re spending, remains important to me. I still share food and healthy living tips on my personal/crunchy IG account @cleancrunchymama, so be sure to follow there if you like this sort of content. But, since this is my blog and I can do what I want 😉 I’ve decided to stray from furniture for once and post our first experience with a new meat delivery service called Butcher Box. I’m not getting anything by posting this, no affiliate links etc, this is just me doing a review.
ButcherBox
If you want to know all about ButcherBox, which is a B Corp, you can read here: https://www.butcherbox.com/. If you sign up for emails, you’ll get deals and coupons, which is how I started with our first box. I signed up when I got a promo with “free” salmon and bacon with my first box. You can pick the size of box, how often you want it delivered and customize the meat in the box. This last part was my favorite because we don’t eat much read meat, and mostly ground beef when we do (hullo taco bowls and slow cooker meatballs). So I ordered a mix of chicken breasts, a whole chicken (bones for stock!), ground beef, steaks (maybe those were free too…) pork and salmon. Everything came frozen in a giant box filled with recyclable padding. The box with shipping and tax was $159.
The Meals
I documented all the meals we got from one box: 16 meals that include a combo of lunches and dinners. The dinners were for all four of us, and the lunches usually one or two (some went to work with Doug). Here’s what I made:
Pork: Slow cooker pork carnitas – one dinner for 4, 1 lunch
Whole Chicken: Shredded chicken for nachos dinner, chicken tostadas dinner, homemade chicken stock for chicken tortilla soup, and also remaining shredded chicken. So, 3 dinners from one whole chicken.
Chicken breast: Breaded chicken and buttered noodles dinner for 4, plus lunch. Then a week later, repeat dinner and lunch, plus chicken on quesadillas for lunch.
Beef: tacos for dinner and 1 lunch, steak dinner and lunch
Salmon: garlic butter salmon dinner for 4, then dinner for 2
The pork carnitas were our favorite and were a new recipe from a slow cooker magazine hubs picked up at the store. We’ll be making that again with our second box. We’re VERY particular about pork and only buy if it’s from a small farm, or a certified organic and humane farm (like Butcher Box). The conventional pork industry is terrible; that’s all I’ll say about that.
Downsides
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows when you buy online. We’re living in Covid times, which means everything takes longer, you have to plan weeks in advance and allow time for shipping, and there might be shipping delays/mistakes (that happened with our second box). Plus, there is a lot of plastic waste with every piece of meat wrapped in plastic. I was very aware of all the plastic and it would be less if I bought from the store. But, with everything there’s a balance, so I’ll keep using towels over Clorox wipes, dryer ball over dryer sheets and reduce my impact that way.
So, How Much?
The burning questions: Did we save anything? How much did we spend per meal? About $10 per meal in meat, and the sides are always a combination of rice/beans/potatoes/fruit salad/bread so let’s be generous and say $15 per meal. You can’t feed a family of 4 for $15 eating out, so I’d say this is a win. And, I saved on time by not going to the grocery store, and money because the grocery store is a total money drain.
Just yesterday (April 20, 2021) our BIG box from ButcherBox arrived. I decided to experiment and get a bigger box to be delivered less frequently, and I’ll stick to Amazon Fresh/Giant for the staples. There was a significant delivery delay with our box so I was forced to buy some chicken from Giant a few times this month, but hoping now that we have everything, May grocery bill will be much less and it will even out.
What do you think? Do you like reading about our sustainable food choices? Drop me a comment, email, or DM. I’d love to hear from you.
