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.