We finally have online grocery shopping near us. I could not be more thrilled. Rob and I always shared grocery shopping and cooking, and the last years i pretty much do it all, which is not really by choice.

Grocery shopping is one of my least favourite tasks, especially in a place that does not carry many foods that I like and has limited service, freshness and selection. Add to that the behaviour of customers, who think nothing of blocking the aisles or cutting in front of you in the endlessly long queues to checkout — it’s just not my thing.

Beyond that, I find that one of my biggest challenges is selecting meals that Rob will like. We are of different cultural food tastes, I’m a vegetarian for many years so I don’t even know how to buy meat in my own language let alone another, and his food tastes seem to change where things he liked before he does not always like now.

We spent about an hour tonight on-line and did our weekly shopping together. The website is not so good (it sucks), so it was very challenging, especially if you already struggle to read the screen with a good website. We did really well considering, but it’s clear to me that we need to do this together to make sure that nothing happens that we had not planned.

As we were searching for something, all of a sudden I saw the total start running up like a casino slot machine, very fast and to an exhorbitant amount, and it would not stop. Some how we ended up with 454 3 kg bags of potatoes in our shopping basket at €1,200 ($1,600) . The Dutch do love their mashed potato meals (stamppot), but that was taking it just a bit too far!

We were able to fix it, even with the crappy site, but hopefully they would have asked us about it if we had mistakenly hit send. I can’t imagine anyone ordering that many potatoes. We  got a good laugh about trying to figure out how they would have delivered them, and what the neighbours would say about our obvious potato fettish.

I think we would have made van Gogh proud, assuming we could have found enough gnarly looking people to come join us for a “Potato Eaters” meal!