First Home-Made Meal and Grocery Shopping in the UK

Although we aren't living in our new house just yet, we were able to cook in our kitchen last night for the first time. We haven't cooked in almost 6 weeks because of the move so it was definitely a big deal for us! We made a spaghetti bolognese with a small side salad and fresh garlic bread. Yum!

To prepare for our dinner, we made our first major grocery run here. In the States, we used to go shopping every week or couple of weeks and stock up. Here people go every couple of DAYS! I think it's because 1) our fridge and pantry space aren't that big and 2) they have great fresh markets here twice a week so people like to take advantage of those. In the grocery stores, you get nasty looks if you don't bring your own environment-friendly bags and you have to bag the groceries yourself. You can do a lot of grocery shopping online here too though and have everything delivered directly to your door free-of-charge.

Learning the different products and brand names is going to take some time. We didn't really think about the fact that you can't get what we're used to over here! Here are some of our interesting grocery store observations from the UK:

• The stores have a selection of "trolley sizes" - they even have charts that help you determine which size you might need depending on the shopping you're doing (we'll get a picture of this later to post).


• The ice cream selection is very limited. They have Ben & Jerry's, but it is very expensive!


• The eggs are not refrigerated.


• Milk comes in TINY little jugs to fit the TINY little fridges. They also have a big section of long-lasting liquid milk that is not even refrigerated (weird!).


• They have HUGE sections devoted to tea.


• At least where we were, we couldn't find sticks of butter - we had to get a big slab of it.


• They have so many different kinds of mayo, it's scary (I believe it is the favorite condiment of this country!).

We are making meal #2 tonight - we'll be having Indian food, of course! =)