Shop N Go

One of the things I do miss from England is my beloved Waitrose. You could always rely on Waitrose to serve up interesting things to eat that tasted delicious. They also did amazing recipe cards which we continue to use regularly here causing much frustration as we can't find all the ingredients that are standard in a Waitrose store.

Here is kiwi land the closest thing to Waitrose is New World but there isn't a New World in Upper Hutt, the nearest town to where we live. This is a double blow to this domestic executive but I'm learning to live with the limitations of my new friends at Pack N Save ("where all we do is to save you $").

One of the main savings that they make - as their name suggests - is you have to pack your shopping yourself (not like New World) and there are no carry bags, you have to bring your own (not like New World which must have the world's record for carrier bag usage). You have to be quick at the checkout ready with your cool bag and cotton bags ready assembled in the trolley to be able to catch the produce as it comes off the line and pack once. If you don't the check out operator will simply pile everything in your trolley and you have to repack again.

On good day shopping at Pack N Save is like a new olympic sport but if you get a grumpy checkout person or they are busy it's really not much fun. To try and overcome the checkout battle I've signed up for Shop N Go, the scanner shopping system that they operate. It's very like Waitrose's system, which incidently I never used but someone it brings me closer to my shopping roots!

Now Shop N Go is a good system in theory but it definitely takes longer to get your shopping done and it's always quite stressful as you never know whether they are going to demand a spot check and you have to get all your shopping rescanned and repacked which somehow defeats the object of the exercise.

As a full time domestic operative shopping systems are something close to heart. Whilst supermarkets are convenient I am increasingly starting to feel like Nigel Slater wanting to shop every day at the local suppliers and producers. But New Zealand isn't like North London with a multitude of right on foodies. This is a country with an economy based on commodity farming.

Still, there are gems around - Meet on Tory Street (meat that almost tasted as good as the organic farm in Buckinghamshire), Pacific Fresh fish (although I get panic attacks looking at the fish which I hardly recognise and don't know what to do with it even if I did), vegetables from the farmers market at Poirirua (although for a farmers market there poor choice of only one veg seller but a multitude of options for honey, jams and olive oil.

I think that the only solution to this dilemma is to grow our own so roll on the autumn when the kitchen garden will be open for business.