More differences from life in Canada!

They don't have cooking wine and milk is freakin expensive.    I wanted to buy a box of franzia  for a risotto, so naturally I went to the cleverly named Liquor Store -- which is pretty much the only place to get alcohol around here.  Convenience stores sell beer, but apparently that's something really exciting.  Other provinces don't even allow that.   Anyway.  I went, and started looking for the cheap box wine section, as one does.   Nothing.  I figured maybe it was stashed under American Wine.  No dice.  They had nice American wines, and even some of the good old standbys.   I was going to suck it up and spring for a gallon of Carlo when I saw the price.  $32 ‽ My god!   So I asked a one of the guys moving cases around.  Turns out, cheap cheap wine doesn't exist, and I had to make due with an $8 bottle of Canadian White.  Of all the things to not have.

Milk is something we do have here, and something we always have in the house.  But I realized the other day, after an especially cringe inducing grocery store checkout, that dairy products make up a good percentage of what we spend on food.  Milk is $3.77 a half gallon.  More than double what it is in Maine right now.  A bag of the cheapest shredded cheese around is $6.  And we're talking no name brand here.

no name is great though.  Simple yellow packaging that tells it like it is with a price tag to match.  The American Cheese we buy for Finlay is just billed as "processed cheese product."  Apparently, canadians just call it sliced cheese -- our friends had never heard of anything called American cheese.   Odd that we would have to call it that in the states.   But as I was saying.  Dairy is easily our single biggest expense.  Followed by vegetables, and, pretty much, everything else. 

Apart from grocery trips and quips, life goes on.  I've been finding a little more work, and you can all look forward to my work as a photographer for cstore life -- the trade magazine of convenience stores in Canada.

I should also mention that I now have another blog, slightly more impersonal, and attached to my own personal website.  Feel free to look at that if you want something other than news about life in Canada.

My dog is pretty adorable

The day after I got to Newfoundland, we got Finlay. He's a rescue beagle, from a shelter called Beagle Paws, which takes in beagles from all over, and sets them up with nice people. Beagles have a long history in Newfoundland as hunting dogs more than anything else. They also face a good amount of prejudice. Folks will keep them underfed and penned up outside -- the better to chase bunny rabbits and the like.



We don't know much about Finlay. He's a year and a half or so, and scared of doors, canoe paddles, and sudden movement. His name means "fair haired warrior," or alternately, "the brave one." Because he's so skittish, we've been pretty slow with the training (his being a beagle certainly doesn't help matters in that quarter) but things are coming along slowly. He doesn't pull quite so much anymore, and he's getting pretty good at sitting down. This is a new development, one he's pretty proud of. When we go out for walks these days, he'll look back at me, expectantly, as if saying "now is there something you'd like me to do?"

Since I've been "working" from home, we spend most of our time together -- me typing, him curled up on the floor. Every hour or so we take a trip downstairs for some fresh tea and a treat.

Our house is right on a river-side walking path (the subject of another post, one of these days) so we get to spend a lot of time walking down by the river. Finlay looks at the ducks, and I wish that the air temperature were above 40, and that the river wasn't full of old concrete blocks.

We were fostering Finlay for the first six weeks I was here, but on Saturday, after a morning trip to wal-mart and an afternoon playing bananagrams with some grad school folks who also happen to be fostering some beagles (yes, it was a puppy play date) we went back to beagle paws and signed some papers and gave them a check. Finlay is now Our Problem. Hopefully by next summer he will be brave enough to go canoeing happily, and trained enough to spend a little time off his lead. Until then, we're rarely separated by more than 6 feet, and I'm alright with that.

Bulk Barn Is Truly Amazing

I lied when I said they didn’t have dried black beans in Newfoundland. I just didn’t know where to look. Since I last wrote, we have made the most marvelous discovery. It’s called Bulk Barn. I first went in looking for canned soup. I figured the store would have pallets of cans and things that nobody wanted, like Caswell's in Waterville. I was so wrong. The only thing they didn’t have was soup. Everything else, they had, including specialty cake pans (if you wanted a cake shaped like Aladdin’s palace, say) for rent $1.99 per rental, no late fees.



This is how it works. Bulk Barn buys everything it can in bulk, then it dumps the product into bins and sells everything by weight. This is like, penny candy on steroids. There’s Candy, dried fruit, nuts, seeds, crackers, chips, pasta, rices, flour (oh what flour), spices, cookies, dog food, cat food, bird seed, honey, peanut butter, and so much more. Including dried beans. We’re not talking like a bin of white flour here, we’re talking maybe 25 kinds of flour: unbleached all purpose, unbleached hard bread, unbleached soft bread, wheat, whole grain, gluten and so on. Including an entire section of gluten free flours (not that I need them, but still) with everything from rice flour to soy flour to coconut flour.

And that kind of variety for EVERYTHING. It’s amazing. Emily and I went back after my initial discovery, and after gleefully pointing out everything delicious, got down to some serious shopping. We spent $86 dollars there (using her 10% Wednesday student discount) and came home ready for a food shortage on the island.




Thank you Canada!