Imperfect Foods Box 1

One of my husband's co-workers told my husband about Imperfect Foods, so I had to check it out. I love mail order subscription services! I miss my Graze boxes! I loved my Cairn boxes too, but I never blogged about those. Imperfect Foods is a mail order food subscription box. They have produce, meats, snacks and pantry items. It's not your typical mail order subscription box though. Most of those boxes are like a Chopped basket. They send a bunch of stuff that doesn't really fit together and you have to figure out what to do with it. That works for some people, but not for me. With Imperfect Foods, you can totally customize the box!

You pick which options you want such as produce(the base model) and add on things like snacks, grains, and meats & fish. They pick a bunch of stuff that fits into those categories and you get to remove stuff or add stuff. I like this system. I like that they put some stuff in my basket and I can decide if I want it or not and then add stuff to it. I find it overwhelming to just go to the list and pick everything that I want, but I like removing the stuff I don't want and then going through the store to add the extras that I want. It works for my brain. 

The concept for Imperfect Foods is that they are helping to reduce food waste by selling things that are either imperfect such as crooked carrots or weirdo shaped peppers that wouldn't be sold in the regular grocery store. They also have things that the imperfection is that someone just had too much stock so they are trying to offload it instead of tossing it. They have some short expiration date stuff as well. They have some stuff that has no story at all and they just have it as an option to add more products so you can avoid going to the grocery store. 

For our first box, we went with all of the box options. Our delivery day is Wednesday and it comes via FedEx. If you live in their delivery area, they'll use their own couriers. Our customization period is 3:00 PM Friday to Noon on Monday. I'm not a fan of the Wednesday delivery day. I'd much prefer either Monday or Friday. Wednesday is just icky. Most of the stuff we get is for use during the work week. The celery that we got on Wednesday was pretty rubbery by Monday when we were ready to use it. 

This is what we got in our first box. It was $38.46 plus $5.99 shipping. Orders over $60 have free shipping at least for now. 

Organic Potatoes (1 lb)

Organic Garlic (2 ct)

Conventional Onions (1 lb)

Conventional Parsnips (1 lb)

Conventional Celery (1 ct)

Conventional Zucchini (1 lb)

Conventional Sweet Potatoes (1 lb)

Conventional Romaine (1 ct)

Conventional Pears (1 lb)

Olympia Provisions Petite Pierre Pepperettes (1.7 oz).

Olympia Provisions Flaco Paco Pepperettes (1.7 oz)

Mary's Ground Turkey (16 oz)

Imperfect Foods - Wild Rice (16 oz)

Imperfect Foods - Crunchy Roasted Beans & Peas, Sweet Chili (6 oz)

Imperfect Foods - Organic Dark Chocolate Nut Pieces (4 oz)

Imperfect Foods - Cherry-Kissed Dried Cranberries (8 oz)

Imperfect Foods - Crunchy Roasted Beans & Peas, Sea Salt (6 oz)

Imperfect Foods - Unsweetened Dried Mango (8 oz)

This is what it looked like it in the box. It was covered with paper packing material. Underneath is a big ice block. The ice block has a drain safe gel in it and it's reusable, but ours had a hole in it. 

I had planned on taken pictures of all the meals we got out of the box, but we haven't used everything yet. We did try this Wild Rice though. The imperfection with this is a small percentage or broken kernels. I didn't really see broken kernels, but we also had an epic failure with cooking it. We put it in the rice cooker with the water to rice ratio on the bag. We didn't include the butter or oil they suggest. My husband added beef Better Than Bouillon. It took over an hour for the rice cooker to click off. The rice was horrible. It was hard and raw. We tried more water and after 45 minutes it went off again. It was still horrible and inedible. We did not follow the instructions. I guess next time we'll try it with the instructions!

 We haven't eaten either of these yet. The story for these is that they were going to be animal food due to a large surplus, but Imperfect Foods stepped in with the idea to turn these into human snacks. It's a little weird for me and I'm not really sure if this would count as reducing waste since the animals will still have to eat something, but it's an interesting story.

 Hubby opened the Pierre Petit first. They had white stuff on them. He thought maybe they had frozen in the fridge, so he left them out on the counter to see if the white stuff would melt. It didn't. He tossed them. I emailed Imperfect Foods and they credited us for both packages and gave us an additional $3.00 credit. He hasn't eaten the Flaco Paco. I think he was a little put off by the other flavor so he might not end up eating these. I'm not sure yet.

I brought these to work and can't find these on the website right now, so I'm not sure what the imperfect story is for these. I can say that they are super yummy. They are loaded with sugar, but they are oh so good! Kinda wish I had gotten more. **EDITED to add** Not that anyone wants to hear this, but let's be real. Turns out, Imperfect Foods uses sulphur dioxide for their dried fruit and apparently 1% of the population might have a sensitivity to it. Guess what! I think I'm one of them. I was having some horrid gas. My stomach was all kinds of rumbly for like two weeks. I had no idea what I had changed that was causing it. I checked with a friend of mine and she said it might be the sulphur dioxide if they use it. I checked with Imperfect Foods and they do use it for their dried fruit. I'm pretty sure that's the cause of the gas. I got a massive case of it within 10 minutes of eating the dried pineapple from Imperfect Foods Box 2.

These were odd sized pieces. I can attest to the oddity of the sizes. See those tiny little balls of chocolate in some spots? Those still had nuts in them. Neither one of us were big fans of of these. The chocolate flavor was lacking and the texture was a bit gritty.

 The mangoes were too dark. There is a story about how people buy an entire orchard to support the farmer and the off colored ones used to get sold at a loss to people for smoothies and now Imperfect Foods gets it to make dried mango which helps the profitability of everyone involved. Again, I'm not sure this is really stopping waste since they were getting used for a purpose and now the smoothie people need to get their stuff from somewhere else and spend more on it. This one is a money maker for someone and a money loser for others. I like how it tastes and the texture is good. **EDITED to add** Pretty sure the dried mango will be leaving my life and I won't rehash the gory details since I already went over it in the cranberries section. 

This is my taco salad that I made with the head of Romaine lettuce and the Mary's ground turkey. The ground turkey did not have a story behind it. It's just one of the things they offer to give us more options. The Romaine lettuce was surplus. I will say that Romaine lettuce does not ship exceptionally well. The outer leaves had fallen off in transit. It was still good lettuce though. We each had a gigantic salad out this thing. We used the six cup bowls and my husband barely had room to stir it to get his dressing mixed up on the lettuce. I would probably get both of these again to make more taco salad.

 

I got a zucchini and had plans of making a zucchini boat or little zucchini mini pizzas, but the weekend got away with me and I knew I wouldn't make either of those on a weeknight so I turned it into zucchini chips. I toss them in oil and garlic salt. It took two days to get them crunchy enough. They didn't last long! They were super yummy though. I didn't see zucchini last week for that box. I'm trying to decide if I should get it in my next box. I love zucchini chips, but they are a lot of work. 

This is our crock pot beef dinner with potatoes, carrots, onion and celery. The celery, onion and potatoes were from the box. The potatoes were russets. We got our box on Wednesday and I didn't make the veggies until Monday. The celery was pretty rubbery by then. I still used it since it was just going into a crock pot so no biggie. Some of the pieces were complete much and some pieces were okay in texture, but they were very stringy. My husband wouldn't eat them after the first one. I ate them the first night and the second night, but the second night one of them was so stringy that I almost puked, so I stopped eating them. The next night, hubby picked out all of the celery. The carrots and beef were not part of the box. 

This is a bad picture since I already drank some of it and it left the nasty green residue all over the pretty glass, but I thought I had taken a picture before I started drinking and it wasn't there. I'll try to get a better picture of the next post. So this is made with free kale from my second box (I know I'm writing about my first box now, but it has parts from both. It also has two pears from my first box, lemon juice that we had, a cucumber from my second box and three carrots from my second box. I want to get back to juicing. When I was juicing every day, I wasn't getting sick. I don't eat nearly as many veggies as I should, so juicing helps get the nutrients I need without taking vitamins. I know eating the whole thing or making smoothies would give me more nutrition, but since I won't eat kale and a smoothie is not going to happen, this is a good compromise. The taste isn't ideal. But I drank the whole glass. 

We haven't eaten the parsnips and garlic. I had planned on making an apple cider  parsnip and carrot thing. I'm planning on doing that tomorrow at this point. We tried one of the pears. I didn't take a picture. It wasn't quite ripe. I don't like pears, but hubby couldn't finish it since he only likes really ripe pears. I ended up putting the other two into my juice that I made with my free kale from the next box. We haven't eaten two of the onions yet. My husband ate one of the apples. I didn't take a picture of it either. He said it was okay. They were a bit small, but maybe that was their imperfection. We haven't eaten the sweat potatoes yet. The plan is to get an air fryer and make sweet potato fries. 

***EDITED to add the parsnips info that I put in my Imperfect Foods Box 2 post***
This isn't the best pic, but I'm still working on my food pictures. Hubby made a big meatloaf on Sunday and we had some of that with some apple cider roasted parsnips and carrots. We are not fans of parsnips, but this was in our first box so we thought we'd try them again. I found this recipe and thought we'd give it a whirl. They took way longer than 35 minutes to cook. I think it was close to an hour. I thought the foil would help make clean up easier, but it was harder. The foil got baked to my dish. It's going to take some effort! When we had them fresh out of the oven, we liked them and thought we would do this again. When we had them re-heated the next night, I couldn't finish them. I wanted to gag over the texture. The carrots were great. The parsnips were not!

***EDITED to add info about the sweet potatoes that we finally ate*** 
We put off eating the sweet potatoes partly because we didn't know what to do with them. We then decided to buy an air fryer. We finally got it. The one we got is actually a seven in one thing, so we'll see how well it goes. Anyway, we got it at Best Buy for $129.99 because we had $75 in Best Buy rewards. Ended up that we had $80! We got an extra $5 certificate that I didn't know about. Anyway, I read some stuff on the Internet and it sounded like these take about 10 minutes. Mine took like 40 minutes so not sure if it's the machine or me. We will experiment more with that. I cut them up super tiny. We actually left these too long and parts needed to be cut off because they had gone soft, but that's what happens when you get surplus food and let ti sit on the counter for two weeks. Okay, so olive oil, garlic salt and rosemary. I tossed it in the machine at 400 degrees for 10 minutes. It wasn't done so I just kept putting it in for another 10 or 15 minutes until it was done. I didn't commit enough to my sizing though so some of them burned and some were not quite done, but They were still flavorful. I liked them. Hubby didn't like them as much, but he's not a sweet potato fan. I think I'd like to make them again, but we shall see.