Introducing a special grocery shopping trip

Sometimes I play games with myself. I do it generally when I feel the need to break-out from a mood or just want to try something new.

The technique is pretty simple. I have to write down just three things that I want to do or which might have useful short term results. I am only allowed to select three, and they must be simple and doable within a few days. I then have to do them.

There are obvious variants to this game, but this time my focus was on things I want to do. Grocery shopping came up number one!

Such a mundane thing, grocery shopping. It's something we do everyday. Why, then, did I select it?

Well, its partly the problems involved in cooking where people have different tastes and are not always home anyway. More importantly, I have been on such a tight budget recently that I simply haven't been able to buy what food I want or when I want it.

Take roast lamb cooked in the Weber as an example. I love this, but when you add the cost of charcoal to the $22 for the leg it just can't be done if you are trying, say, to feed three or four people and only have a budget of $14 for the meal.

This bears upon one point I made in Sunday snippets, my objection to paying $70 for a very indifferent meal. For $70 I can serve six people roast lamb plus trimmings twice. Since I have only been able to afford to cook roast lamb in the way I described once in the last two months, my reactions to that dinner out were quite visceral.

Happenstance including the desire to write has isolated me from the Sydney metro life style. I no longer belong. I want other things.

I can still enjoy it as I have done since I was sixteen. I can enjoy the beauty as I walk along the waterfront. I can enjoy a well done metro experience, a glass of wine or a coffee and aperitif. However, I can no longer accept paying (to me) big money for indifferent fashion or popularity.

I may seem to have come some distance from my starting point. However, I thought that I might share with you in one or two posts the sheer pleasure that can come from expenditure of a sum of money much less in total than the cost to the group as a whole of that indifferent meal.