Tag Archives: supermarket substitutions

Too Many Roses

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After the serious business of poetry, we get back to the sort of blog I am better known for – observations on buying groceries via the internet. I am never afraid to tackle the big issues . . .

The TESCO shopping arrived last night. It featured several substitutions, including roses. I had ordered a small bunch of roses for Julia, but they had been out off stock. Nothing grand, just a small £3 bunch. The environmental cost of flying flowers from Africa is huge, but I try to keep our impact down so I think I can be forgiven a few flowers now and then. Anyway, nobody is perfect.

They sent two £10 bouquets. I had, it seems, ordered two bunches by accident. When I was told that one colour was out of stock I should have left them to substitute with another colour. Instead I assumed they wouldn’t send any and ordered again. They didn’t have any £3 bunches, even after the change of colour I made (bunch, by the way, is probably slightly misleading as a term for £3 worth of roses). So they sent two £10 bunches. I can only assume that the £10 bunches were at the end of their shelf life., as they only charged me £6. Sometimes they are good like that. We currently have more roses than we really need so will be sharing them tomorrow. Even though I’m annoyed with myself for over-ordering, it’s still nice to get a bonus.

Something similar happened with the mushrooms and I ended up with two small packs instead of one medium – extra mushrooms for the same price. Sometimes these things work out. I’m on TESCO again because ASDA really messed up last week. I didn’t mention it because there was no convenient place to do so, but they forgot to include the frozen food.  That meant we had no burgers or veggie burgers, which meant a substantial amount of the menu planning went out of the window. They should, as I pointed out to them, have immediately sent us replacements as it was a mistake, not a case of low supplies. The refund they sent was not an adequate response for a hole in the menu. This is the trouble with shopping on the internet, a silly mistake can ruin a week’s planning.

Flowers – detail

To quote W. H. Davis –What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare. I expect he would have included random flower deliveries if they had supermarkets in his day.  Life should include unexpected deliveries of flowers, as I said to Julia, otherwise what’s the point of it?

Which reminds me. We had a poem at the funeral on Thursday. I’m not keen on most of the ones they use. If I should fall from my perch in the near future, can you please do me a favour and spend a day of quoting this one to people. It needs quoting more widely. 

Starts with Stew and Finishes with Soup

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I note my last post was number 2,800. I always like round numbers.

Yesterday Julia did some tidying while I was out. She rang me to tell me that she was half-way through, which worried me. However, when I got back she had moved all the furniture, put down the rug that had been rolled up at the edge of the room for years after we were given it, and put everything back. The room is brighter and the floor feels warmer but I was right – it is too big to fit properly. However, considering what the next winter is going to be like I think we need warmth more than a rug that fits. OK, I say “rug” but it’s more of a carpet. It’s easy to forget that carpets weren’t always fitted.

I’m giving up on the lottery. I had four wins at the weekend – two lots of £5 and two free tickets. I think each one was probably a win and the tickets were thrown in for free. I hope so, because if not I seem to have bough too many tickets. All that luck being squandered on winning just £10. I may as well save my money and use the luck on something else. Julia says it doesn’t work like that, but we gamblers know it does. I’m just glad that I’m not given to big-time gambling. All those smoky clubs and international jet-setting are not really me.

We had vegetable stew for tea last night. Then the woefully inadequate ASDA delivery arrived. Seven substitutions. One substitution was for 2 half kilo bags of carrots for a 1 kilo bag. Fair enough. Then they substituted parsnips with more carrots and swede with ready chopped swede (which always goes off so fast) and gave me rosemary for thyme. This might be OK in a traditional folk song but it’s no good for stews and we have a gardenful of rosemary. They sent us kale in place of leeks, which would have been a disappointing quiche, and 6 Free Range Eggs in place of 15 Economy eggs (telling us they had saved us money as the 6 eggs were 15p cheaper than the 15). I used the word “rip-off” when they sent me a customer satisfaction survey. Finally we were told there would be a bag of cauliflower florets in place of a cauliflower, but there wasn’t. There was a cauliflower.

How, I ask myself, can we be short of root vegetables. They are seasonal and many of them are grown within an hour’s drive of here. Something is going seriously wrong with the world when you can’t buy parsnips, swedes and leeks in autumn.

Tea tonight was curried vegetable soup. Or vegetable stew with curry powder, extra water and a quick application of the stick blender. It was cheap, quick and nutritious. And it makes “convenience foods” look quite time consuming. We had a mackerel sandwich with it, my concession to oily fish.

And those are some of the domestic details that I missed out of the last post. Header picture is soup from an October 2014 post.