cakes vs cookies

[jazzfish]

In my defence, I don't make cookies very often, so four eggs sounded like a reasonable number. And somehow I read the lines "1 egg" and "4 c. flour" as "4 egg." It looked perfectly normal until I kept adding flour and it kept not turning into thick mixer-killing cookie dough.

On the bright side, it seems that the only difference between "cookies" and "cake batter" is the number of eggs you put in, and now we have a tasty maple sheet cake. Needs vanilla icing, but other than that.

Someday soon I will finish my post about maple syrup, about which Canada is unsurprisingly more serious than the US. Also someday soon I will rant about the difficulties of trying to buy food in Canada, with the Block O'Butter being the biggest offender.

Comments

[jazzfish]

The food thing and the banking thing are the only real problems I've encountered so far. (Where "The banking thing" refers to the refusal of banks to issue debit cards that can be used like credit cards: there's your credit card which works like you expect, and there's your debit card which is tied to your bank account and requires a PIN, but there's no debit/credit card, so you can't use your bank account directly to make online purchases.)

Other than that, it's been pretty much sheer awesome all the way.

[tulip-tree.livejournal.com]

The butter thing still drives me nuts. Get a kitchen scale, if you don't have one, and look up the conversion for tablespoons of butter to grams of butter - it's still less convenient, but it makes following baking recipes doable.

Online shopping is less popular here, in general, and there are a lot of ways in which Canada seems 5-10 years behind the US. I've never wanted to use a debit card in that way, so I don't miss it, but there are other things I've noticed (e.g., in the US you can buy mutual funds online yourself, but here there's no way to invest in mutual funds without going through someone who is licensed to sell them. Cell phones are stupidly expensive for fewer minutes, etc.)

There are quite a few things that aren't available here - some, you learn to live without, and others you stock up on and bring back from US trips. My Canadian friends all have their favorite American things (junk food, variety of breakfast cereal, etc.) The things that annoy me the most are the ones where the packaging looks the same, but they have actually sold the brand to another company, and it's different.

I have yet to find cottage cheese that's not gross, or string cheese that actually strings. The lack of tose things makes me sad, and I have on two occasions this year brought them back from Buffalo (but that's a long way to go for groceries, so that only happens when I'm already in Buffalo, which has only happened twice in four years).

And I miss Trader Joe's. If they ever come to Buffalo, I'll do a lot more cross-border trips.

So that's my rant about food shopping in Canada - I'm curious to hear yours when you get around to it. Things I do like up here are the relative cheapness of a lot of produce, and the fact that there are more restrictions on hormones and antibiotics and crap in dairy and meat, so I don't have to be particularly careful about what I eat since it's all pretty safe, especially now that I've also got a baby to take into consideration.

[jazzfish]

That's an excellent plan for the butter. We have a kitchen scale (got one sometime late last year for flour, with the result that my pancakes have finally been consistently pancake-textured!) but I hadn't thought of using it for butter.

The no debit/credit card thing is mostly annoying because there's no way to make online purchases using our shared account; we have to have one of us do it and reimburse ourselves.

I've been lucky enough not to run into the packaging thing (except for peanut butter, and I noticed that "Kraft" is not "Jif" no matter how similar they look). Thanks for the warning, though!

I expect all trips to Seattle are going to turn into shopping trips. :) Trader Joe's is muchly missed.

I'd thought the cheapness of produce was just a result of being closer to where more of it was grown on the west coast. Nice to hear that it's a nation-wide thing. And I hadn't known about more FDA-type restrictions but I'm not surprised. That's good to hear as well!

[tulip-tree.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure this is how most of the world handles their butter - they don't have sticks of butter in Europe, either. Based on the recipes I've seen from Europe, they do all their measuring by weight. I do a lot more of this than I used to, and it's easier once you get used to it (and have appropriate recipes or notes.) Canada is kind of a strange hybrid, though - some things are metric, others are imperial. People still weigh themselves in pounds, and a generation ago, they used Fahreinheit instead of Celsius. As far as cooking recipes go, in the Canadian magazines I subscribe to, they tend to have two columns of units, one in the familiar (to me) cups, tablespoons, etc., and one in metric. Oddly, they don't usually give weights, so it's different from recipes from England or New Zealand or somewhere else where people are accustomed to weighing everything.

Breyer's ice cream is NOT the same, but the fancier stuff ("double churned" and anything else in black and purple packaging - I forget exactly all the words they use on the labels) is decent. The blue packages are not worth it - there are ingredients in there that have NO business in ice cream.

Nabisco is "Mr Christie" for some reason that I once looked up and don't remember, so it probably didn't make much sense. The products are similar but sometimes a bit different.

Almost all my trips to the US are shopping trips. I like Canada, but it just doesn't compare to the US when it comes to prices and selection on almost everything.