thought for food...

I always enjoy grocery shopping. It's entertaining to marvel at the variety and the differences from home. Just imagine the Asian aisle (or aisles if you're lucky) from a Canadian grocery store and then multiply it by about ten. Whole aisles of nothing but various instant noodles. The seafood section is much bigger than the measly fish counters at home, and the variety - eel, octopus, random tiny fish, more squid than you can shake a fish stick at.... The prices however, are not cheap compared to Canada. I bought a 5 kg bag of rice the other day, on sale for 1800 yen. Bread comes in packages of 8, 6, 5, 4, or 3 slices. (about 178 yen for 8 slices of white bread - no brown bread, and raisin is about the same for 3 slices) And there are no ends (hetta). Somewhere in Japan is a plant where all the thousands of bread ends are shipped, and then processed into - something - I have no idea... Vegetables are also quite expensive, with the possible exception of carrots and potatoes (eggplant seems quite cheap, but I really don't remember how much it cost at home...I pay 2-300 yen for 4 small ones). Fruit is gorgeous. Each piece is near perfect, and sometimes individually wrapped. Peaches range from 100 yen (with blemishes) to 680 yen - each! (100 yen is roughly 90 cents CAD, for anyone who hasn't already looked it up!) I've seen watermelon for upwards of 2500 yen. Fortunately, I don't really like watermelon. Things like peanut butter and jam are also quite expensive (although I just found strawberry jam at the 100 yen shop - hope it tastes good!) as are dairy products. For half a dozen 1/2 inch cubes of what looks like real cheddar, you`re looking at about 4-500 yen. I haven`t bought any. We get some shredded mozarella for a reasonable price. But it`s not all bad - there`re lots of sales, and we manage to do quite well cooking, eating out occasionally and generally enjoying the food. I made some decent sweet and sour sauce from scratch. Anyway, I won`t bore you with more ramblings on what I eat, but I will toss in some pictures...

Green Tea KitKat - no chocolate, but really good. I`ve only seen them once - there were also Sakura (cherry blossom) flavoured KitKats at the movie theatre, but I haven`t seen them again either...they were good, but not as good as the green tea...

Inarisushi (agasushi to some at home). 190 yen for three. slightly cheaper at the grocery store. and 8 slices of white bread for 178 yen (sometimes on sale for 99).


















One of several 100 yen instant noodles I`ve tried for lunch - freeze dried egg softened up quite nicely. Some of them are actually quite complex - 2-3 different packets of seasoning/sauces/vegetables, built in colanders, and pretty tasty.

















Say what you want, if it's not real Kraft Dinner, it's not the same, but this was reasonably close, for 200 yen. There's a bigger import store a short bike ride away that I'll get to one of these days... A tiny jar of peanut butter sells for over 200 yen. This giant (1.8 kg) imported jar cost me 1500 yen. But it's lasting a long time and has been worth every yen!