Yesterday was Pesach, the Jewish festival of Passover. It's normally a joyous affair with friends and family; this one was just with four sullen teenagers. (Our homestay student wasn't sullen, just very, very confused.)
During the week of Pesach, the most important thing is to only eat unleavened bread - that is, bread that hasn't risen. Normally we buy matzah from a Jewish-owned deli nearby. A shipment is sent from Israel to New Zealand once a year, and it's always late, so we usually end up buying the matzah from the previous year.
This year we couldn't go to the shop so we ordered online. The shipment arrived two days before Pesach and the courier dropped them on our doorstep only a few hours before Pesach began. We were looking forward to "fresh" matzah this year, but it turns out it tastes exactly the same as one-year-old matzah. That's a bit worrying.
Meanwhile, my wife had to go to the hospital that morning for some more tests, but this time they wouldn't let me accompany her. Instead I sat in the car and did some work until my laptop died, then out of boredom I went to the grocery store.
All the grocery stores had long queues and the only way to avoid them was to buy online, for either delivery or collection. However, you could only book a week in advance and the slots sold out as quickly as they released them. A week ago I'd placed an order but the earliest slot was Thursday, the day after Pesach, and I knew there were going to be a lot of last-minute items required for the seder (dinner).
So I got in the queue but I hadn't planned to go to the market and I didn't have the shopping list. I tried to remember what I needed but I couldn't. I tried to call my wife but she was busy getting x-rays and blood drawn. In the end I got a bunch of random stuff and left.
That afternoon, when we got home from the hospital, I checked the list and found I'd missed practically everything, so I picked up my bags and got in the queue for the supermarket across the street from us. If never seen the line so long - it snaked outside and around the corner - and it took 40 minutes to get into the shop, 5 minutes to grab what I needed and 3 minutes to walk home.
The next day was my scheduled collection, and it was with no small amount of smugness that I walked past all the people in the queue, picked up a huge trundler (trolly, shopping cart) and then walked past all the people on the way back.
Because the shops are across the street, we never take the car, but of course we often buy more than we can carry. We get around this by taking the trolly home, which is technically stealing, but we usually bring it back in a few days.
Of course, all those people I had just walked past were now watching me steal the shopping cart.
When I got home I had another issue: Three trips to the supermarket in two days, plus the pesach leftovers, had completely filled the fridge/freezer. Thankfully my wife has a good eye for these things and she managed to fit everything in. I don't know if we'll ever be able to get anything out again.
One thing she removed from the freezer was a large tupperware container full of rotten bananas. For years I used to make banana bread regularly so I never threw away bananas. At some point I stopped making banana bread but I still kept the bananas. When they were completely brown, I would peel them and put them in the tupperware container. I now had a lot of rotten bananas in a tupperware container.
My favorite recipe called for five medium bananas, Google translated this to 1.5 cups and soon I had small, single-use plastic baggies. It was like being a drug dealer for monkeys. I hid the small bags in the back of the freezer. .
When I finished, and was looking at a fridge/freezer overflowing with food, I then placed another grocery order online. That was because the only collection slot was Wednesday, 6 days away!
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