Shopping daze

Do not fear, my lovely readers I have not gone all cheesy on you. I am not attempting some sort of corny title. I do truly mean daze, not "days" in a bad ad kinda way.

What I am talking about here is the sort of deer in the headlights reaction I tend to have when faced with a supermarket or any large shopping centre. I find that if I do not pack myself a neatly drawn up list of things I have to buy and where I have to buy them, then I always find myself frozen and stupid. Frozen by the lights? The noise? The people? I do not know what it is exactly but it is quite strange. I can enter a supermarket with my IQ in tact, withing 2 minutes I am reduced to a fumbling idiot. I can wander aimlessly up and down the aisles. Staring at things on shelves not really even thinking about whether I want to buy them, just staring off in a daze.

I go completely stupid! For a while there I thought it was my eyesight not adjusting well to the bright lights. Then I considered the temperature changes. So cold in the dairy aisle, f-f-freezing in the ice cream section then warmish around the rotisserie chickens. I can't blame the little Tinker because my shopping daze problem existed well before her arrival.

I have been known to pop down to the supermarket to buy 3 things and come home with about 13 bags of things. None of them anything to do with the three I actually set out to buy. Time slips away when I am at the supermarket. I don't know where it goes. Maybe I lose it in a particular aisle? Is the aisle with the eggs? There are so many different eggs now. Did you know you can buy free range organic eggs grown in Queensland by Japanese farmers? Well you can at my local shopping centre.

It isn't just the supermarket either. It is the rest of the mall as well. I am completely unable to go shopping without a target. I can get lost in the mall all day long and come home with absolutely nothing but a pair of black socks for my husband. Of course these day long trips to the mall are a thing of the past now that I have my Tinker but you know what I mean. Now I just get 20 minutes trips to the mall where I wander aimlessly and leave with a Teletubbie or something.

When I had money and or time to burn my shopping daze wasn't such a disability because it didn't really matter that I set out to buy a raincoat, wasted 8 hours at shopping centre and came home with a bag of broccolini and a manicure. These days however it is important that I get what I set out to buy and for this reason I am one of those anal shoppers who takes a typed out shopping list sectioned off into aisles and even separated into sides. For example at supermarket A.) I know that eggs are in the 3rd aisle on the right opposite the tinned tomatoes and at supermarket B.) I know the chicken consomme is in the 5th aisle on the left opposite the cous cous. On the days where I have not made myself a list I always come home with crazy things like weird sausages.

That was Monday night. My reason? There was a man cooking up free samples and because I tasted one and there was nobody else there at the time I felt awkward saying thank you and walking away while he had his Madonna-type headset thing on and he was looking right at me, so I took a packet and put them in my trolley.

Is there anyone else out there who suffers from 'shopping daze'? Tell me about it!

Fromage

I was at the supermarket this morning for what I call 'housewife happy hour'. 9.30am -10.30am the aisles are full of mothers getting in early, either with their babies in the trolley or having just dropped their older kids at school & daycare.

I go alone, my little cherub doesn't like shopping. She demands full 1 on 1 attention at all times and will not tolerate her mama looking at anything but her, so she visits Grandma while I get the groceries. Anyway I was gliding up the dairy aisle. Yes, gliding. For a change I didn't have the trolley with the bung wheel and I didn't have the child in the seat so it was quite a light ride really.

Housewife happy hour is great because the deli items are fresh and all the shelves are fully stocked unlike Sunday night shopping which I do in desperation sometimes. Anyway I was in the dairy aisle when I heard someone speaking French to their baby. Baby talk in french is slightly cuter than baby talk in English. Anyway she was asking the child whether she enjoyed sitting in the trolley and then she was telling her the name of each item as she packed the trolley.

"Du beurre" she was saying as she put some butter into the trolley. I turned to see which butter she had chosen since I do like a good quality butter. I was horrified to see she had in fact chosen a dairy blend. Not even real butter? What? How on earth could a French woman choose fake butter. Horrified, I turned back to the yogurts. I was carefully scanning ingredients to find the best one for the little miss when I heard the French mother saying "fromage" to her child. Curious, I looked up. She hadn't chosen a cheese at all. She had chosen a packet of floppy pale yellow plastic.


Kraft Singles. Not cheese. Never ever would I even think to put this rubbish into the cheese category. Fake Cheese. Yes, it can go in the FC box but no sir, it should never ever be called cheese and definitely not fromage said in a sexy french accent. Horrible, how horrible.

That lady had totally ruined the reputation of glam French yummy mummies everywhere. They were not whipping up amazing gourmet yummies for their babies. They were not choosing real food they were buying awful fake plastic cheese. Hmmf.

Suddenly I felt slightly wholesome, slightly superior. Maybe I am a yummy mummy after all. I make food from scratch, I buy good ingredients. Ok so maybe I'm still sporting a massive post baby muffin top 15 months after giving birth but I glide up the aisles and I never ever call Kraft Singles fromage.