Sleepy Shopping

I always used to say that I hate shopping...and whilst that is still pretty much true for clothes shopping, I have definitely learnt to love shopping when food and/or kitchen appliances are involved!

On Friday, I went into town with Toby after dropping Izzy at school. The children had decided that 5.30am was an acceptable wake-up time that morning so I was pretty tired. Tired shopping = spending lots of money it seems!

The first shop I went to was Holland & Barrett. On Maria's recommendation, I wanted to buy some Seed & Bean chocolate...

I ended up buying 4 bars, but in my defence (!) one bar was to give to someone else, and they were buy one, get one half price. I can't wait to try these!

Next shop was Boots - from interesting chocolate to boring essentials - wet wipes, tissues and the free magazine:

This was one of the cheaper, but more useful shops. I used the wet wipes and tissues straight away, and read the magazine in the bath that afternoon while Toby had his nap. Bliss :)

The first two shops were things I'd planned to buy, but after this my tiredness kicked in. I went into one of our local cook shops to see if they sold doughnut pans. They don't, but I came out with this instead...

I do already own a stick blender as my Grandma gave me her old one. But it is a bit old and I can't get it clean enough to want to use it, so I have been making soup in my blender jug instead. This will make soup-making a lot easier, and was only £7.99 so justifiable to my tired brain!

Next was Julian Graves for some planned peanuts (to make peanut butter) and some caramel nuts reduced to 10p:

Is there are real difference between paleskin and redskin peanuts?? There were blanched peanuts which were, understandably, more expensive but then there were paleskin peanuts that were half way between the price of the blanched ones and these ones. The shop assistant didn't think there was any difference in taste so I went with the cheapest option. I quite like having flecks of peanut skin in the nut butter anwyay.

Next shop, and by now I'd definitely got into the habit of buying one thing from each shop, was a local health food shop. I was very restrained though, just buying a jar of honey that I like.

They've stopped selling Booja Booja chocolates again which helped with my self-control - they sold them at Christmas and will apparently sell them again for Easter, but apart from that they say there is no demand for them. Shame.

At this point Toby and I went to Costa for a coffee break, well for me anyway.

This was a gingerbread latte, my favourite. I didn't buy myself a cake as I'd only had breakfast an hour or so before. Toby got a pack of the wafer biscuits they sell by the til though - he's come to expect those whenever we go into Costa!!

Revived by the coffee, we started to head home. With a few more shops on the way. I randomly went into The Factory Shop with nothing in mind, and came out with a little tractor toy for Toby and some "pink milk" straws for Izzy:

Our final stop was Tesco - pizza for dinner as I knew I wouldn't have the energy to cook, and a random drink that was by the checkouts. I hadn't realised it was a lucozade drink - I was drawn in by the words "lightly energising" but it was actually pretty nice. Cranberry flavour, not too sweet, and only lightly fizzy which was good - I'm not a huge fan of fizzy drinks.

It's worrying how easy I found it to spend money as a way of comfort...no more aimless wandering around the shops when exhausted for me!!


Do you like shopping? Do you find that you buy more when you are tired or are you good at just sticking to a list? Like I said, I don't like clothes shopping. The only shop that I came out of empty-handed on Friday was a clothes shop. I can never seem to find anything I like, and I never have the enthusiasm to spend much time looking. Plus the idea of trying things on with Toby around...nope!

Food shopping though...that I enjoy! I love having time to browse the shops to find new things that I haven't tried before.

I'm normally pretty good at going into town for the things I need - buying the things on my list and coming straight back home. Friday's combination of me being tired and Toby being really well behaved (unlike his normal self that constantly tries to climb out of the pushchair!) led to an easy, and unnecessarily expensive, shopping trip!!

Weekends are for...

Relaxing, tidying, and shopping!

Let's start with relaxing - Saturday. Every good relaxing day should start with pancakes, and Saturday was no exception. I made my strawberry coconut pancakes and topped them with Dark Chocolate Dreams, agave nectar and more strawberries...

Delicious :) The children then slept from 10am-1.30pm so Liam and I got some peace! I spent some of the time writing a blog post about our previous night's dinner...I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one that likes checking out menus in advance! :)

Once Izzy and Toby finally woke up, we had a quick lunch of poached eggs on English muffin...

before planning our afternoon activities. Liam took Izzy swimming - she was so excited she squealed in his ear!! Once they were gone, I had a quick snack of a Pulsin' Berry Burst bar...

and then took Toby out for some fresh air. He wasn't impressed by the idea of going in his pushchair...

so we went by foot instead. Just to the local outside space to have a walk around, but it was still fun. Toby kept wandering off in different directions/onto the grass, so it took 30 minutes to walk a distance that normally takes less than 5 minutes - lucky we weren't actually trying to get anywhere!

He had to take a few bench breaks - he's only got little legs!!

I timed our walk well as, just as Toby was getting super tired, we bumped into Liam and Izzy on their way back from swimming. Liam could carry Toby home on his shoulders, and Izzy could tell me about all the fun they'd had!

As we were nearing our house, we could smell the takeaway food and none of us really felt like cooking - curry it was! We all shared this yummy cheese naan...

and I had some pilau rice with mattar paneer (paneer and peas), and aloo gobi (potatoes and cauliflower)...

This was all really good! I'd had a cauliflower curry before that was too dry, but this had some sauce so was nice. I do sometimes order the vegetable version of my usual curries (pasanda, jalfrezi etc) but they tend to be mainly green beans which aren't my favourite vegetable, so having a couple of vegetable side dishes instead is a good option. Yum.

Sunday was supposedly tidying. I woke up with lots of energy and made Izzy and I pumpkin boatmeal for breakfast. I make mine with black strap molasses as the sweetener, which makes it a bit darker than Katie's, but really delicious...

As per Izzy's instructions, I topped the baked oats with half an Alpro vanilla dessert each and blueberries. My normal looking one...

and Izzy's "heart" one...if I keep practising, I might one day be ok at making pictures with food right?!!

Mid-morning my Dad came round to take the children out for a few hours, so I started tackling the chaos that is our kitchen!!

Before:

After:

Tea and coffee shelves empties, cleaned and re-stacked with less than before, jars of grains replacing the bottles of red wine that neither of us like but have been given as presents, and most of the food on the surfaces put away.

Then it was time for a snack to give me an energy boost - one Rude Health multigrain thin with Dark Chocolate Dreams and raspberries...

Amazing combination!

Then the time had come to tackle the chaos that is our food cupboard.

Before:

I ran out of energy before I finished doing all of the cupboard, but I did manage to sort out some of the shelves. The shelf for "my" food was obviously my main priority (!)...

and I organised the shelf with all the tins on...

Hmmm, maybe I don't need to do such a big dry goods shop at Waitrose before we lose Liam's staff discount!!

I also sorted the top shelf - cereals - which was easy, but I haven't found the energy to tackle the baking shelf or the carb shelf yet...too much food! I did also sort out my snack box before the children came home...

and then it was time to sort out lunch. Liam had leftover curry, Toby fell asleep during lunch as he'd missed his morning nap, Izzy had an egg mayo sandwich and I had egg mayo with an avocado...

two of my favourite foods, yes please! :)

Sadly, despite the delicious lunch, my morning energy didn't last, so I spent most of the afternoon on the sofa cuddling Izzy and Toby...perfect Sunday afternoon! :)

When Liam got home from work, we all wanted a quick dinner. Liam and the children had prawn stir fry, and I tried out the brown rice noodles miso ginger soup from Clearspring, topped with half a pack of sesame smoked tofu...

I have to admit, I didn't really like these. The noodles were nice, but I wasn't keen on the soup/sauce. This was my first ever time having miso though so it may be that flavour that I wasn't keen on. I still ate most of it though, just leaving the soup sitting in the bowl at the end.

After dinner, I had a delicious bar of Conscious chocolate - rose flavoured - which I hadn't tried before - I really liked it!

That brings us on to today - shopping! As Liam works on Sundays, he has Mondays off, so we still kind of count it as our weekend. Well, not for much longer as he starts his new job next Tuesday, but until then.

After not having much in the way of "proper" food yesterday evening, I wanted to start the day with a proper breakfast. Oats In A Jar! I mixed 30g oats with 30g peanut flour, plus Oatly milk and dried apple, served in an almost empty DCD jar once cooked...

This was great - it's been way too long since I had oats in a jar! I normally have at least 40g of peanut butter on top of my oats, which still doesn't feel like enough, but today it turned out there was only 20g peanut butter left in the jar (I weighed it before and after) yet it stretched much more and felt like plenty! :)

After we'd dropped Izzy at school this morning, Liam and Toby and I headed into Exeter for some shopping. As I'm typing this, I've just realised that I haven't taken photos of any purchases, so I'll have to try to make do with links instead! We started off with Starbucks though, iced vanilla chai latte of course...

I so wish Costa sold chai lattes!!

Next we hit the shops. We weren't too successful before lunch - one of the main things we were looking for was a new wok - using a couple of gift cards we were given for our wedding - as the last two we've had have rusted really badly. We couldn't find anything that fitted our requirements though, boo. Any recommendations for a wok that, most importantly, doesn't rust/lose any coating please?!

We gave up on shopping for a while, and stopped for lunch at Pizza Express. I had a thin crispy pizza with mozzarella, goats cheese, spinach, red onion and caramelised onion...

This was fantastic, I loved all the different flavours. Liam was a bit concerned about trying to eat a nice lunch when Toby hadn't had a morning nap, but he sat in a highchair really nicely and munched on bits of both our pizzas...

After lunch, we had a bit more success with shopping. We picked up some new bedding from Argos...

(source)

I wish our bedroom looked that tidy - next on my list for when I get some tidying energy!!

Toby's lack of nap soon caught up on him - he fell asleep while we were shopping, aww!

In the final shop of the day, Liam and I finally managed to find ourselves some coats. We went into Mountain Warehouse and they had a sale going on, plus an extra 10% discount if you filled in a survey about them, which we could do in store on our phone and take advantage of the discount straight away. I can't find the exact coat I bought on the website, but it looks something like this...

(source)

but the pink seems brighter than in the picture and it is from the 'Storm' range not this one...I'll take a photo when I next wear it! Perhaps not the most fashionable coat (as my little sister was quick to point out!!) but it will keep me warm and dry on the school run - I am alwasy so envious of parents who have decent coats when I'm getting soaked!

Once we had bought our jackets, we headed back to the car. Via Starbucks, for Liam to get another iced coffee and a rocky road bar - I resisted getting anything - small step but proud!!

My Mum has been in Venice this weekend, and my Dad has been down to look after my little sister. He went home this afternoon though, so we had Olivia around for dinner. The only vegetarian meal my Mum and I could think that Olivia would eat was mushroom risotto, so that's what I cooked...

We hadn't had this in ages, but it was really nice. Having simple meals sometimes is no bad thing! This evening's snackage has included some of Liam's chocolate and an Eat Natural blueberry yoghurt bar that Maria sent me a while ago - gobbled down too fast to take any photos!!


What have you all been up to this weekend? Relaxing, tidying, shopping etc? I haven't been on the computer that much this weekend, and this post has taken most of the evening to write, so I will have to catch up on my Google Reader tomorrow. I'm sure by the time I've sorted out the blog header it will be almost time for bed tonight!