I thought I’d follow eemusings‘ example and talk a bit about how much food costs here in Canada.
I daresay food is more expensive there, but we still aren’t dirt cheap compared to how much things cost in the United States (not to mention the level of quality produce!)
We shop at lower end grocery stores, ethnic stores, and we’re picky about what we buy. Even if stuff is on sale, we still expect a certain level of quality and taste.
It’s surprising how many things here are tasteless, or mealy. We’ve learned to avoid certain vegetables as a result.
I saw in grocery stores downtown (mainstream ones) selling rotten strawberries for $3 a small box.
I mean, c’mon now!
We also don’t buy a lot of fresh tomatoes unless we can get them at a good price; they’re horribly expensive here for some reason at around $3.99/lb which is around $8 per kilogram, but that’s cheap compared to some places that charge $6.99/lb or $12 per kilogram!
The bulk of it purchased at an Italian (ethnic) grocery store in Montreal, QC, here’s a sample receipt from one week, translated:
We find the fruit very cheap and of decent quality at the Italian store, but the vegetables are far cheaper in Chinatown.
BF also bought 2 packages of chicken wings at a local grocery store for about $5 each for 10 wings (not pictured).
With the above, he made Parmesan dusted Chicken Wings with Porto flavouring (SO GOOD!) with the pasta.
The sauce on the wings are whole preserved tomatoes, onions and garlic.
Then I went to Chinatown and got 2 bunches of asparagus on sale for $1.50 each and some Thai basil for $1.00 (it didn’t go well with the dish, by the way).
This is the meal I made with it, with some chicken wings and a bit of pancetta. I don’t put a lot of meat because I’d rather add more veggies.
I washed the asparagus, cut it into thirds (removing the woody, stalk-y ends; only buy thin asparagus!!) and stirfried it in about 10 minutes with some butter and salt.
Added my already baked chicken wings (seasoning was just some salt) and pancetta, add some rice et voila!
The asparagus is good enough on its own. I am about to go back and get more next week to eat just as-is.
I also picked up a fresh bunch of grapes for $3.84 in Chinatown and I squeezed some for impromptu juice and it was SO DELICIOUS.
TOTAL SPENT FOR A WEEK: $79.36 for 2 adults
Which is about $317.44 a month or $158.72 per person/month.
We sometimes spend a bit more, sometimes a bit less.
It depends on what we feel like eating that month.
We had a little bit more meat than we normally would have (chicken wings AND pancetta? Usually we pick one or the other).
What really saves us money is that we don’t eat that much.
I say this because I’m currently reading Hungry Planet: What the World Eats by photography Peter Menzel and writer Faith D’Aluisio.
I’m seeing what people eat around the world, and for some of the pictures, I’m thinking: WHOA. That’s a LOT of food.
The book is really incredible and comes highly recommended by yours truly. Full of great information and wonderful images, I am so pleased I bought it.
I also picked up What I eat around the world in 80 diets by the same duo. I can’t wait to start reading it.
What I am seeing in the books is that people in more developed countries spend a lot more on processed foods than sticking to the ‘real stuff’.
In the book, they make special mention of that too — as people get richer, their diets get worse by buying more processed stuff, junk food, eating out more and so on. The poorer you are, the less you have to spend on processed stuff.
As for us, we don’t buy processed items, no soda pop kept in the house, not a lot of candy (treats once in a while), we make things from scratch… I feel like that’s partly the reason why we spend less.
We also just do it to feel better. Eating processed or deep fried food is fine once in a while, but not all the time.
Maybe we should keep track (and perhaps try to photograph) what we eat in a week, treats and all. 🙂
OTHER THINGS WE DO BUY ON A REGULAR BASIS
- Milk
- Oatmeal
- Flour
- Rice
- Butter
- Other kinds of veggies or fruits
- Eggs — if I buy eggs, I don’t buy meat to eat
OTHER MISCELLANEOUS FOOD PICTURES
These are not just from this week but from the past 2-3 weeks I figured I could throw in here. 🙂
My mom sent home some pickled octopus she made for us, and we ate it cold, warm and at room temperature (the best).
BF put it on top of bread, on a whim and we enjoyed it even more! It has peppers, onions and lots of vinegar. SO good.
We also like simple foods. Brie on bread. The brie wasn’t so good (from Quebec), because it was too buttery, it didn’t have the flavour of brie. Still, I ate every bite.
As a treat, I also picked up some Italian pastries.I don’t know their names and they didn’t look familiar to me.
I wouldn’t say they are as good as Mike’s Pastry in Boston, Massachusetts, but they were decent enough for me to enjoy eating them, especially the ricotta cheese one!
Pick some up at Pasticceria Alati-Caserta in the Italian area of Montreal.
This one had a hard pastry shell I DID NOT like. The pastry cream was nice on the inside however.
This one I liked a lot better. Zeppole? Z-something, anyway.
The pastry wasn’t amazing, but it was better than the crusty hard shell one above.
The fillings I got were ricotta cream cheese (next two pictures) and pastry cream as the second.
I do wish the pastry was softer or something. It tasted a bit dry, a bit old.
Yummy pastry cream.
Still doesn’t beat Mike’s Pastry in Boston.
Also had some Japanese Cheesecake made in Chinatown (BF makes it far better..), but it was pretty good for the price and the quality.
And some jasmine tea jelly:
The jelly was refreshing, but not sweet. I’d love to eat it in the summer.
THIS IS WHAT I ATE IN TORONTO
And since I’m doing the post anyway, this is a sample of what I ate in Toronto.
We went to Matahari Grill in Toronto on Baldwin Street.
Review? DO NOT GO THERE. What a rip off.
The only decent thing were these Chicken Satay skewers. The rest was ho-hum and NOT worth the money.
Where you should go instead is Restoran Malaysia. It’s kind of out of the way, you have to drive about 30 minutes from downtown to get there, but it is authentic and SO WORTH IT.
This is just one of my favourite dishes there — Roti Canai (Chicken with Roti, a type of naan-like bread).
Picky natives always moan about how the roti is not really like “roti”, but whatever. It tastes good to me, so I’m sold.
This is one of the dishes that every kid (including myself) loves.
Deep fried turmeric chicken with shrimp chips. WIN WIN. 🙂 SO yummy.
Before I left for Toronto, BF made duck sausage “hotdogs” for me. French-style, he said.
Morbier cheese melted on top, green onions on a baguette and delicious duck sausage, although I found this one too orange-y.
I also bought this weeks ago but never posted it.
Deep fried shrimps from Fung Shim (no, I really don’t eat deep fried stuff all the time :P), and I made 6 meals out of this by adding vegetables I bought in Chinatown and white rice.
And here’s a nice vegan meal I made for a couple of days because I couldn’t get enough.
Chickpeas boiled with a teaspoon of baking soda, some green onions and miso paste.
You can also eat this with white rice, on bread… sometimes it turns vegetarian with a little cheating poached faux hardboiled eggs.
Read about some other recipes here on how to cook for cheaper, quicker and to eat at home.
WANT TO READ MORE REVIEWS?
If you are ever interested, I am starting to post reviews on Yelp, and I have a list of recommendations (things to do/see and things to avoid) on a page called “Places” on this blog from every city and place I’ve been to or lived in.
It’s a work in progress, so please go easy! 🙂
Just a girl trying to find a balance between being a Shopaholic and a Saver.
I cleared $60,000 in 18 months earning $65,000 gross/year.
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um. one comment
I LOVE ROTI CANAI!
that is all.
ohhh yummmmmm! the jasmine tea jelly sounds interesting…
Zeppoli is the word but I’ve never seen it as dessert. It’s always been blobs of fried dough with an anchovie in the middle. A savory, not sweet and always for the Feast of St. Joseph.
The prices for the cans of tomato paste are outrageous. Could you drive over the border into the States and find a grocery chain with better prices? You could stock up on canned goods and boxed items. Was your pasta fresh? I can get a pound of Barilla for $1 USD on sale. There’s a New England grocery chain called MarketBasket which beats all other regional chains in price and quality.
Good post. That is so true about developed coutnries eating worse. I think America is overfed and undernourished (probably goes for Canada too, but I don’t have first hand knowledge) I recently moved to Moscow, Russia from the United States, and I will say that food is so much more expensive here and you can’t always find what you are looking for, but when you do you know it is fresh, it is in season, and it is local, and I just feel better now. I love that my bread goes moldy in 2 days if I don’t eat it. Bread is not supposed to last 2-3 weeks, right?
Mmm…your food posts make me hungry! I do most of my shopping between 2-3 major grocery stores and the local Asian market. I try to buy as many fruits and veggies at the Asian market since prices are cheaper. Once summer hits, I grow my own veggies and what I can’t or don’t have room to grow in my garden, I’ll buy at the farmer’s market.
Food is definitely something we don’t skimp out on. DH is extremely picky on the cuts of his meats (because he was forced to eat some pretty gross things growing up because his family was less fortunate) and so our meat costs can be on the high side. Now that he wants to switch to organic grass fed beef, I can see our grocery bills going up even further. The only good thing though is that the two of us eat the recommended amount (palm size) of meat and the kids eat half that, so we don’t go through as much as most families would.
I am shocked at the cost of your tomato paste! It must be the imported kind.
zeppoles: a tradition around here (less than 10 miles from Mike’s Pastry in Boston) for the feast of Saint Joseph and Easter. Delish!
Ha – foiled! I was eating my favourite easter chocolate reading this post so was only a *tiny* bit jealous of the brie and pastries!! Last food post had me salivating in frustration!
I wonder if your shrimp chips are our prawn crackers?
You ate all these food in one week? How are you not like 300 lbs? :p
I love those books! Own them both. I am eating a combination of resort food and noodles/ foil Indian packets/ fresh fruit/ … I’m on vacation in Hawaii.
That tomato paste must be made of solid gold. For realz.
Everything looks so yummy! I’m a very plain eater – meat and potatoes type of gal, but it does keep the grocery bills low. There isn’t anything much cheaper than potatoes. While I often can’t find ethnic ingredients out here in the country, it is really easy to find great produce in the summer at great prices. I don’t think there’s anything better than garden-fresh asparagus 🙂
I think it’s really interesting to see the price differences. I live in the southern US. When I was reading the list, I cringed at the price of tomato paste and pasta – here I can get both for around $1 a can/box. On the other hand, asparagus here is $3.99 a bunch on a good day, $5.50 when it’s at it’s most expensive. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it for less than $2.99 a bunch and that’s at the height of the season when it’s on sale. Also apples, oranges, and grapefruit a more expensive here.
Last year my average over the course of the year was $62 a week for groceries. My housemate and I both buy groceries and just share and split the cost, and I figure he spent about the same as I did, so that would be $125 a week for 2 people. I’d love to get my part of that down to $50 a week or less, but I’m not sure I can get away with too much cutting w/out impacting him as well. The other option would be going to a strict system of each of us buying our own food, which just really wouldn’t work.
Brie on bread is a cheap (if you buy it at CostCo or Trader Joes), simple and delicious snack.
are there any dollar stores in canada.. i buy some groceries at the dollar stores here in the u.s.
I’m still obsessed with your food posts and impressed with your grocery purchases. I tend to spend $60 on myself weekly and still run out before the end of the week. I think I’m doing it wrong. 🙁
I live in middle of the east coast in the states. I took a week vacation to visit San Francisco this year (1st time.) Everything is expensive. We got a really good bargain stayed near union square after we shopped for like 25 hotels/inns. The food is expensive, so we ended up taking the train to go to China town. The veggies/meat there were priced just right (much less expensive compared to the rest of the city,) similar to what we have in our home state. Chinatown is the place to go for fresh veggies & fruits without breaking the bank.
Well, this week I’m trying out raw vegan food for a change (versus normal vegan food that’s a mix of raw and cooked). But, I’m almost surprised how similar the stuff I bought is — which I guess is a good sign for my regular diet. I usually buy mostly a mix of dried legumes, quinoa, seeds and nuts and whole grains from bulk bins and then a mix of fresh fruits and veggies and then a few treats like chocolate. Well, I did the same. The dry goods are for soaking or sprouting now, though. I was able to get most of the same fruits and veggies. And I got raw (or mostly raw, at least) chocolate. The one addition is raw carrot juice which is usually a more occasional treat. Maybe one day I’ll get a juicer and make my own. I’ve made some in a blender and strained it, but it’s a pain.
I’m not sure how long I’m going to keep this raw thing up — or even mostly raw, at least, since I’m not in it 100% (turns out the nuts I bought probably aren’t really raw anyhow). It’s not exactly high cuisine without a dehydrator or juicer plus a lot of talent and time I’m not really willing to spend. The stuff at raw restaurants is far better than anything I’ve made at home, lol. But, it’s a neat little experiment.
so, that’s dinner…I don’t see breakfast or lunch items on the receipt! or do you eat leftover dinner for lunch and bfast and have fruit for snacks??
that is what I spend for ONE person per week–grah–also shopping in 2-3 different places to get the best prices, and not eating very well, at that. ah well…gotta live!
Food is the one place we still spend money on. You always have such interesting meals, I like to think we are adventurous in our meals, but there is some great inspiration here.
I plan on making homemade macarons soon, I think I made have said the last week too, but this week I am actually going to do it.
You can bet when I’m no longer working every weekend we’re going to spend SO much more time grocery shopping! (We actually kind of enjoy it.) Going to farmer’s markets, taking the time to always go to a good butcher and grocer (we don’t have any particularly good ones nearby, the best ones are way out in the further suburbs)
As it stands, we have to cram it into small windows of time when we can, and it sucks. Time really matters when you want to eat better and cheaper produce – and of course the time of day matters to.