During this lockdown, they say that routine and regular social contact are the most important things to keep people going. So what could be better than resurrecting a blog that hasn’t been updated in around four years to get us through these troubling times.
Since my most (relatively) popular blog posts have been about my food shopping habits and meals I’ve cooked, I thought I’d make that the topic of this post.
Like most people I’ve been trying to reduce the number of times I’m going outside to reduce the risk of picking up the virus or transmitting it to anyone else. I decided that instead of shopping (approximately) weekly, I would instead try to shop for a whole fortnight. Here’s the list of things I ran out of, and why I won’t be shopping for more than a week.
- Milk – My diet is high in breakfast cereal and I normally go through 6 pints of milk in 7 days. Milk doesn’t normally last two weeks. If I bought 2x 6-pint bottles, the second one would almost certainly be going bad by the time I was through it. I’m not doing UHT.
- Bananas – My 11am mid-morning banana is a key part of my routine. Even if I had bought a sufficient quantity of bananas, they would still be well past their past by the start of the second week.
- Lettuce – I didn’t really run out of this, this one ran out on me. This was the only item I bought that went bad. I think it must have been close to its “best by” when I bought it and then I forgot about it for a couple of days. Unfortunately I had to throw about half of it away. I don’t often get lettuce so I could do without this one.
- Chicken – I thought I had 2 or 3 chicken breasts in the freezer, turns out I only had 1. Fajitas made with sausages still work though. This was bad planning on my part really.
- Onion – I bought a “seasonal vegetable pack” which contained an onion that went mouldy. Fortunately I had also stocked up on onions separately so it didn’t matter. The seasonal vegetables (carrot, turnip, swede) worked out well though, I made it into a soup with some leftover potatoes. I even made enough to put two portions in the freezer.
So there it is. Milk and bananas are the two reasons why I will be going shopping every week.
*Side note: It actually worked out at 12 days between large shops, with an intermediate milk purchase on day 8.