Waitrose Treats

Hello! How are you all today? I'm loving the sunshine we've got here...even if it is still really cold, it makes such a nice change from the grey lack of light we've been having lately!

One little boy didn't agree this morning though - this was him this morning, at the time we normally leave the house to take Izzy to school:

He doesn't normally sleep this late so I didn't have the heart to wake him (never wake a sleeping baby!) so I left it until the last minute and then scooped him into his pushchair. He inevitably did wake up, but was quite happy munching on some Nature's Path O's on the school run!

I took this photo of Izzy on the way to school - it feels like it's so rare to have sunshine these days that I wanted to capture it!

All of the photos in today's post are from my iPhone - I hope it doesn't affect the quality too badly! Liam took his laptop into work today, and we are still waiting for our camera to come back. For some reason my little sister's camera - which I have been using - will only upload to Liam's laptop, not mine, and I didn't want to have to wait until this evening to write this post. So phone photos it is!

After dropping Izzy at school, Toby and I carried on walking up to Waitrose. I'd forgotten how steep the hill was - I don't know how I managed it when I worked there, especially whilst pregnant with Toby!! My friend suggested that the walk meant I deserved a lemon yum yum (doughnut) - good thinking! As I've actually managed to stay relatively on track with healthy eating the last couple of days, I decided to treat myself with a few slightly healthier things instead.

I first gravitated towards the juice aisle. They had a couple of new things that caught my eye - cold-pressed apple juices (apple & passionfruit, pink lady apple, and golden delicious apple):

Interesting smoothies - I liked the sound of orange & carrot, and orange mango & pumpkin...not so sure about the raspberry & red pepper though!

In the end, I was a bit put off by the prices for a tiny bottle, so decided to stick with an old favourite instead. I always used to think of Tropicana as expensive, but not compared to the newer ranges! Orange and raspberry juice, mmm!

I used to drink so much fresh juice when I was younger, but don't drink as much these days. A couple of weeks ago, Liam thought he was treating me by buying me a carton of apple & raspberry juice drink. Bless him, he didn't realise there was a difference between juices and juice drinks but I hate how much sugar they add to the "drink" versions - completely ruins the flavour of the lovely fruits! This was much better, delicious!

I also treated myself to a pack of Vietnamese vegetable spring rolls for lunch:

These were quite nice - when I first started eating, I really enjoyed them (hence my positive comment on Instagram) but by the time I got to the third roll, I couldn't finish it. :-( I don't know what it was - they just had a weird aftertaste, which I've also found with Waitrose vegetarian sushi, don't know what causes it though. These rolls also had loads of fresh coriander in them, which I hate, so they turned into a very messy lunch with me picking them all out!!

Luckily this was just part one of lunch. Once I've finished this post, I see carrots sticks dipped into one of these in my near future...

Love! Houmous was on my list of "necessities" anyway, but as they had the flavoured houmous on offer 2 for £2, I couldn't resist!

I also bought a few Nakd bars as they were 4 for £2.50:

I didn't really mean to end up with two of the cashew cookie ahead of the other flavours - I started with two cashew cookie and two pecan pie, and then noticed the ginger bread on the shelf below so swapped one of the pecan pies out without thinking about my flavour preferences. Oh well, I love all of these flavours so can't complain - I probably wouldn't have been able to choose which one to have two of anyway!

I do enjoy shopping in Waitrose. We used to shop there regularly when Liam or I worked there, as we got 15% discount. Now neither of us work there, we tend to do most of shopping at Lidl, which is closer anyway, but sometimes need to go to Waitrose to buy some things that can't be got in Lidl. Todays "needed" purchases were quinoa, tinned coconut milk, paneer and (yuck but Izzy loves them!) cheese strings. But as you can see above, I ended up buying quite a few things that weren't on the list as well! I've often said that about Waitrose - their basic products (milk, cleaning products etc) are actually often comparable to the other supermarkets, but when you go to Waitrose you (or certainly I!) tend to get drawn into buying their more luxury products as well and that's when the shopping bill adds up!

Do you shop at lots of different supermarkets/shops or do you tend to stick to one main one? What are you favourite "treat" foods to buy? Like I said, we do most of our shopping in Lidl these days - I find them especially good for fruit and veg (better than our Waitrose in fact, in terms of quality as well as price) and they often have good prices on branded products. I do also shop in Tesco Express for convenience, health food shops for "my" foods, and Waitrose for treats and things like tofu, quinoa etc which I can't get elsewhere.

I've just realised that most of that rambly paragraph will have no relevance to people who don't live in the UK, sorry! My favourite "treat" foods are often fresh fruit and things like yoghurt - I find it sad that berries, for example, are so much more expensive than biscuits! Of course I also loving buying things like dark chocolate (Lindt sea salt, mmm!) and often get tempted by Waitrose's patisserie counter as well...but I managed to skip that entire section of the shop today! Helped that I had to fit everything I bought onto Toby's pushchair, so space was limited!

Oh, also, while I remember! Thanks for all the comments on my colourful knives - I love them! I got them from my local shop but the brand is Taylor's Eye Witness.