Not-quite-festive grocery shopping

For someone who grew up in England, another Christmas living alone in the US during a pandemic will certainly be strange. Listening to BBC Radio online helps. In my grocery shopping today, given what is easily available, I went more for convenience foods than items I would have thought of as being seasonal; I will cook my usual, more healthful, meals on fewer days. Complicating the meal planning are that the coming two weeks include days off work and a rescheduling of the usual Saturday morning shopping.

With today's lunch I am eating a can of Progresso's spicy Italian-style wedding soup. I give them credit: their spicy range does reach a good heat level for me. Further, my usual fallback of non-spicy soups — lentil, garden vegetable, butternut squash, hearty tomato — are all quite good, notable given that I do not usually like canned butternut squash soup.

Stopping in Aldi was a disappointment: I planned to pick up Edam cheese and white chocolate, they appeared to stock neither. Aldi's the only place in the city that I have found Edam, and I had wanted white chocolate in attempting a simple cookie recipe (just an experiment), fortunately Food City had plenty.

Also fortunate was the weather: we had thunder and lightning earlier but the rain was already lighter by the time I finally dragged myself out of the house. Tomorrow is forecast to be sunnier.

During my shopping, I was comfortable in wearing an FFP2 under my cloth mask that has a HEPA filter inserted into its pouch (thanks to mst3kmoxie). Few other shoppers were masked.