Some people enjoy shopping, others do their best to avoid it.  My husband falls into the first category and I somewhere between.  He is an inveterate shopper, finding items appearing to him simply irresistible in their appeal.  When he is overcome with the need to secure something he will rationalize its purchase and commit to it.  Impulse buying at its most urgent.

I no longer cringe when he proudly unloads onto the kitchen counter melons, oranges, cheeses, artisanal breads that have fulfilled the needed requirements of a) being on sale, b) being somehow 'different'.

It's the appeal of the 'different' that gets him.  I'm the kind of person who could happily eat the same things day in, day out.  He, on the other hand, needs variety, it's his spice in life.  He becomes readily bored with food he is familiar with, and looks for a more exotic replacement.  His search is never-ending, and provides a spur to me to occasionally think up some food combinations that are different and if I'm lucky, appealing to him.

From time to time throughout the week he will disappear on a shopping expedition.  I don't accompany him on these forays.  For me the weekly food shopping is enough, an activity that is required but not an enjoyable one by any means, serving the primary function of stocking the pantry to enable me to put together meals for the coming week.

These extra forays are required to add zip to menus.  Last week he went out to the bulk food shop. 

I've been cooking hot cereals for breakfast every other day, now that winter has arrived.  The usual; large-flake rolled oats, Red River cereal, Cream of wheat.  I would like to add quinoa to the oats, but he doesn't care for the texture.  He enjoys experimenting with taste, so he brought back 8-grain cereal,  kamut flakes, and kamut granules, organic spelt and muesli.  We filled up large jars and plastic-lidded containers and will use them alternately now for winter morning breakfasts.

The 12-grain cereal combination contains cracked wheat, rye meal, steel cut oats (he doesn't like steel cut oats), hulled millet, barley flakes, thick flaked oats brown flax seeds, buckwheat groats, white sesame seeds, sunflower seeds and golden flax seeds.  The 8-grain cereal combination contains cracked wheat, cracked rye, cracked triticale, barley flakes, flaked corn, cracked oats, millet seeds, and flax seeds.

We're rotating them all, cooking them up for breakfast, adding sunflower seeds, ground flaxseed, a little brown sugar, a spoonful of Kefir, and lots of 2% lactaid-reduced milk.  He's the critic, I'm experimental  subject-neutral; he pronounces judgement and my opinion is in favour of them all.