Grocery Day is not very Posh

I was just reading my friend John Leistler's blog at http://www.john-jdl.blogspot.com/. He moved to Amman Jordan just four weeks before I moved to Grand Turk. His latest blog is about the posh life. In the blog he discusses spa treatments, gourmet dinner parties, being waited on my servants, and traveling to exotic places over the last few weeks. Which is not his normal routine, but over his current break he has had some very nice invites. Sounds great to me.

On Mondays we look forward to grocery shopping.

Grocery shopping here is kind of a game, not a puzzle game, but a get to the finish line first kind of game. Every Monday a produce boat arrives at Government Dock. In the early afternoon an email goes out telling what time the boat will be unloaded and when produce will be at the grocery store. On Monday evenings we go to the store.

You normally meet friends and colleagues at the store. Monday is grocery night. More business is done this way than actually takes place in a normal working day. Tonight, for instance we ran in to someone from the tourist board while getting ice cream at Cool Beans just after shopping. This person is now running the Canadian tourism office. We talked for a few minutes, and he met the family for the first time. Then he made tentative arrangements to bring me up to Toronto to do some tourism shows.

Anyway, back to shopping. We get all of our weekly groceries on Monday evening. We try and plan out what we would like to eat and then we adjust this to what is available. We have figured out a few staple meals that we eat almost every week. We have Caribbean jerk chicken wings with beans and rice once a week. We have a whole chicken with Caribbean jerk beans and rice once a week. And we have chicken with potatoes and rice once a week, without Caribbean jerk seasoning. Usually we also have spaghetti with leftover chicken stewed in Ragu marinara sauce. We also have bought hamburger patties which were on sale the last two weeks. When I get to Provo I will usually try and bring back pot roast and steaks from the IGA just to mix it up.

The first few times we went to the store we bought some things that I assumed would always be available. These included a large jar of Jiff peanut butter, a small bottle of vegetable oil, and margarine spread. Over the last three weeks, as we have run out of our first purchases, we find that many items are not regularly stocked. Now, if we see something we like to have on hand we buy two. Also, some items you can only buy in bulk.

Then there is also the expense of certain items. Some things are not worth having when you have to pay three or four times what you are used to. We drink very little soda pop. Deneen is not even drinking that much Diet Pepsi anymore. We have gone from three gallons of milk a week to 1/2 gallon a week.

Coffee, however, we buy in bulk. A wonderful espresso blend Dominican coffee is normally available in a four pack for just over $15. A week ago we bought a bulk 10 pack of spaghetti. We also always try a splurge on something each week. For the last couple of weeks this has been cheese. We argue over buying an $11 frozen pizza, but $8 for a small wedge of Stilton Blue Cheese seems like a bargain. I am going to eat the blue cheese tomorrow with honey dew melon.

We have not found small bottles of vegetable oil for the last three weeks, so tonight we broke down and bought a gallon. We need this to cook frozen french fries. The only way I can get everyone to agree to eating fish. Luckily, I had kept the small bottle so we are going to refill it. I guess there is not much of a posh life here.

Our latest indulgence has been Duncan Hines Dark Chocolate Cake. Cake mix costs $2.50. Icing for the cake costs around $8. So usually once during the week and once during the weekend we make a cake and eat it like brownies. In a good week we can stretch a cake into two after dinner deserts and one or two breakfasts.

I track our grocery expenses here just like I did in the states. I am like that. Between 2002 and 2005 our grocery expenses averaged $1 per item. Meaning that if our grocery total was $100 the number of items purchased would be 98. Some items might be $3 but these were offset by several cans of beans at .50 and so on. This was very consistent. Starting in 2006 this began to creep up. In 2007 our average grocery bill was $2 per item. Again this was extremely consistent. What we consume on a regular basis did not change that much. I understood this to be inflation catching up to us. Here, our grocery bills average $4 per item.

Our dinner tonight consisted of two Di Giorno pizzas because we ate late and Deneen did not want to do dishes after we picked up Martin from soccer. These cost $11.75 each. As I am looking at our receipt, our weeks worth of rice cost $1.75 and our weeks worth of red beans cost $1.79. The other night we were talking about what we would eat if we went home. Lucas said he is never eating at Chipotle again because he is never eating rice and beans after we leave here.


Side note:

On a side note. Tonight at soccer Martin said the coach read off a list of names of the nine people going to a tournament next week. Martin was not one of the nine. But this is really to be expected. In the scrimmage during the last half of practice, Martin shot four of the goals that allowed his team to lead six to two. At the end of the practice the coach read off the nine names again. Martin was one of the nine.