Food Shopping

It is Thursday!

Thursdays are grocery shopping days. It is also senior discount day at our grocery store and we get 5% off our order because we are "old". Well ... we are over 60 and I will take any benefit I can get for reaching that age - even a "senior citizen" discount.

Grocery Shopping - it is one of those weekly events that we have done for years and years. It begins with trying to create a menu for the week, (sometimes checking through cookbooks and sometimes just dumping whatever comes to mind on the menu,) checking the grocery store weekly sales, rooting through the pantry and freezer to see what we need, and so on. All preparation for the act of cooking the daily meal each evening *sigh*.

In my next life, I am going to have a cook who can do all that for me or at least marry someone who enjoys cooking. This is my least favorite thing to do each week.

My husband and I have grocery shopped together our whole married lives. I enjoy his company. He seems to enjoy to process. His favorite area of the store? The meat counter. He heads there like a kid going into a candy shop. He is primarily a beef-eater. And he could live on ground beef if we were limited to just one choice. My favorite area of the store? Produce. I love the colors and the smells of the space. I love that I could eat any of these things WITHOUT cooking. I really love that it is the healthiest part of the store.

The rest of the store? It is just much too much.

I prefer a smaller grocery store with fewer choices, but in my city, big grocery stores are the norm. In fact, we are scheduled to get a Wegman's next year (For those not familiar with this chain store - Wegman's is a super sized, up scale grocery store - the biggest of the big. You can buy not only food, but the tools you need to make most things plus tons of stuff you didn't know you needed until you walked in the door. It seems to have a "cult" following among some.) I enjoy visiting these jumbo super grocery stores as an outing, an occasional visit, a time to explore to see what new thingy I can find - but for regular everyday food shopping needs, give me a small grocery store every time. I must be in the minority in my city because we don't have any small grocery stores.

The food shopping chores end with getting all the bags into the house and unpacked! Now that doesn't sound like such a big deal, unless you remember that I have 20 steps into my house from the parking lot. Today it is scheduled to be 100 degrees outside with poor air quality so it will be many sweaty and breathless trips into the house.

And for some undefined reason, we always manage to leave something in the trunk of our car. If we are lucky, it is a canned something. Several years ago, however, we left a package of flank steaks that had been rolled with butter, garlic and blue cheese and then sliced into patty sized servings. We didn't find that package for a week! But as the week progressed, we became aware of a stench - the kind of stench that says "something has died in your car." At some point I refused to get into the car until we could get rid of the smell. By the time we found it, the package was green - ugh. We found a public trash can to discard the offending meat into because I wouldn't put that smelly thing in our trash!! And it put us off flank steaks for a very long time.

So today is grocery shopping day, something we have done about 2,184 times over 42 years!

There should be a law against that!

That will be our day - minus the green meat I hope!