A welcome diversion

This week I’ve been flat out working, with little time for much of anything—other than work, of course. That obviously included blogging, apart from a few quick posts. Today was a welcome diversion from all that.

Our friends Dawn and Darren, who are American expats who live in Wellington, were up in Auckland for the weekend. So, we met them for lunch, going to Federal Delicatessen, which is an Kiwi chef’s interpretation of a New York Jewish deli. The name, by the way, is because it’s on Federal Street.

After lunch, we were going to take them to the airport, but we had some extra time and decided to stop by Martha’s Backyard. Nigel took the scenic route (literally, actually) through Mission Bay and Kohimarama.

The photo above is of our latest haul—pretty subdued by our standards (actually, the shelves were rather empty, and I heard a worker telling a customer that a new container was expected soon. Dawn and I were talking about how over the years we’ve been here we’ve found Kiwi substitutes for the things we used to buy in the USA, or started making things from scratch (like, for example, cakes, without using cake mixes).

Here’s a little confession: A lot of the things I used to like—either when I lived in the USA or that I used to seek out at American products stores—are things I don’t like any more. US soft drinks, for example, taste weird to me because they have high fructose corn syrup in them (the ones we have in New Zealand, even Coke and Pepsi, don’t—they have sugar). Other products I now find too salty, or too sweet, or whatever. Apart from Little Debbie Nutty Bars, which still taste exactly as I remember them, thankfully—I don’t know what else I’d get to feel nostalgic about otherwise.

A further example of this change is buying the Ziplock sandwhich bags, but that’s about being a thrifty shopper. Ziplock bags aren’t sold here, but similar ones from Glad are. The Glad sandwich size bags are just under 12 cents each, while the Ziplock bags worked out to less than 7 cents each. Ironically, I don’t actually use them for sandwiches, but for storage. Still, for something that doesn’t spoil, this was a good buy (unlike, say, the cases of those little cans of Vienna Sausages—does anyone actually eat those things?!—or the cases of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, or the giant bags of buttermilk pancake mix, or the super-tanker size powdered drink canisters…).

The fact that I was more excited about a bargain in sandwich bags than in junk food probably says a lot about how my food tastes have changed. That, and the fact we bought so little junk food. I guess times really do change.

We dropped Dawn and Darren off at the airport—too soon!—and came home so I could finish up work, which I did. Regular blog service now resumes.