MelinUSA

I am moving close to Portsmouth in New Hampshire in 3-4 weeks. I have 4 children age between 14 months and 12 years and in a nutshell I have the weekly food shop and basic monthly clothes shopping down to a fine art here in the UK! I appreciate the above comes with experience, individual tastes and half the fun of food shopping is trying out for yourself anyway. However I wondered if anyone had any experience of the local area, which supermarkets are nearby, are there any local food markets each week etc... Thanks.

Bob

For clothes and households, you're not far from the outlet malls, Freeport and Kittery in Maine and Concord in NH.

For food, Trader Joes is a good place to start out, especially for kids snacks and frozen things like veg.

Price Shopper/Market Basket, I don't rate them that highly as they're not great where I am, but others love them and they do have good deals weekly so worth a browse, especially if they're newer in the area.

Shaws, is a bit meh, though they often have a pretty decent international section.

Wegmans is lovely, but I don't know if they have one in NH yet.

Hannafords is generally a safe bet for price and quality.

Wholefoods is a nice organic place, but rather expensive.

As for markets, no idea about Portsmouth itself, but they are usually seasonal and tend to end around November, but you might have some indoor ones, good chances as it's a bit of a hippy town and Exeter not far away has a lovely market in the town centre each week. Dover is also not far and worth a visit, it's a lovely little town as well.

kins

Hannafords is your best supermarket IMO. In the bakery section I really like their All-natural Multigrain bread - it's the closest thing I've found to a nice British granary loaf.

Shaws does a World Food aisle that has some British food in it, so if you really need golden syrup or Galaxy chocolate you can get it there. I think the quality there is pretty bad but it's a good place to get staples like flour, toilet paper, etc.

I think you're a long way from Trader Joes - either Portland or Boston - but if you are near one then they're great. Nothing like anything in the UK.

TBH I think grocery shopping for a family is quite difficult at first. You can't find a lot of the stuff you're used to. The prices are completely different. A lot of things taste different to what you're used to (eg hummus - although I now really like the US taste).

Also the recipes here tend to measure in cups and tablespoons whereas your British cookbooks are in oz or grams - I found that weird at first. Now I still mostly just use British cookbooks but it can be hard to get the right ingredients.

I used to get really tired out supermarket shopping because I'd be converting prices from $ per pound to pence per gram to work out if it was good value. Eventually I just gave up and bought what looked good or we needed.

You should find clothes shopping pretty easy living near Kittery, but I've been here over 6 years and sometimes I still get stumped wondering where to buy certain things. A big difference here is that supermarkets don't tend to sell clothes and stuff the way your typical British Sainsburys or Asda does.

Bob

They opened one in Portsmouth last year and it's really nice, not that big and near the mall, but it is a good one.

kins

Ohhh nice. I would definitely recommend shopping there then

watchamacallit

Portsmouth has 'Market basket' supermarkets and they are better than any supermarkets we have found in the north east USA, really great value. We don't live anywhere near there but passing though and spending a night in a hotel en-route to Prince Edward Island, we did a bit of grocery shopping and were very suprised by the company.

robin1234

We've lived in both the US and UK so half our cookbooks and recipes are British, half American. We have all the cup and teaspoon type measures and also a good kitchen scales, so use either weight or volume, whichever the recipe uses, rather than attempting to convert recipes which would be a complicated project.

Never noticed houmos being different .. It's more garlicky in Britain, or what?

Bob

Horrid business practices though, on par or worse than Walmart and they are very hit or miss on quality.

Great weekly sales in the flyers though.

Bob

Horrid business practices though, on par or worse than Walmart and they are very hit or miss on quality.

Great weekly sales in the flyers though.