Losing Your Cooking Mojo

Faith

No. Across the board, average income in Vancouver is about E32,000 (data is from 2009, so it may have increased slightly). Meat and cheese are just disproportionately expensive here for some reason.

That being said, a lot of things are cheaper than home, particularly eating out, so it weighs heavily in our favour in other ways

YellowFeather

Yeah - my cooking mojo is so gone too. I'm also away foreign. Working long hours and supermarkets near me are closed by the time I get out.

Went to a market the other night with great hopes of picking up lots of yummy food ingredients, then got a call from work half way through and had to abandon it all.

My staple now is frozen veg, some sort of meat/fish, and beans. There's no satisfaction in making that.

Alun

I experienced the same thing as Faith when I was over visiting some friends in a decent sized town in Oregon, and I offered to cook for them. It was a University town with a bit of an 'alternative' vibe to it, but even there I struggled to find some quite ordinary ingredients (leaf spinach, sweet potatoes, chickpeas) without going to some quite niche shops and paying a small fortune for them. Like you said, eating out was still ridiculously cheap, so there must be a strong disparity between wholesale and retail otherwise the restaurants would also be affected by the prices for their raw ingredients.

Mystery Egg

Alun wrote: »

I experienced the same thing as Faith when I was over visiting some friends in a decent sized town in Oregon, and I offered to cook for them. It was a University town with a bit of an 'alternative' vibe to it, but even there I struggled to find some quite ordinary ingredients (leaf spinach, sweet potatoes, chickpeas) without going to some quite niche shops and paying a small fortune for them. Like you said, eating out was still ridiculously cheap, so there must be a strong disparity between wholesale and retail otherwise the restaurants would also be affected by the prices for their raw ingredients.

I had this experience in Oregon too! I went to Trader Joe's to buy ingredients to cook for dinner and one red pepper set me back $4.

$4!!

Alun

Mystery Egg wrote: »

I had this experience in Oregon too! I went to Trader Joe's to buy ingredients to cook for dinner and one red pepper set me back $4.

$4!!

I think that was the place I went to as well, come to think of it.

Taboola

Mine is gone as well so in an effort to stop eating lunch out everyday I've bought some salads from M&S to try get some inspiration.

Faith

Surprised you found Trader Joe's so expensive! We travel down to Washington every so often to do our grocery shopping in Trader Joe's because it's so much cheaper than anywhere in Vancouver*. It's actually owned by Aldi too, so it should be quite reasonably priced.

*This is such a common occurrence in Vancouver that it triggered Pirate Joe's . TJ's aren't interested in opening in Canada for some reason.

In August 2013, Trader Joe's, which has no stores in Canada, filed a lawsuit in Washington state against the owner of the Vancouver, B.C.-area Canadian shop, Pirate Joe's, for trademark infringement, false designation of origin and false advertising, among other claims.[31][32][33][34] The owner of Pirate Joe's bought large quantities of products from Trader Joe's stores in Washington, and resold them at a slightly higher, grey market price in Canada.[35] In October 2013, Judge Marsha Pechman dismissed the case, ruling that Trader Joe's did not provide sufficient evidence of any economic harm caused by the operation, and that the store's owner could not be convicted under the Lanham Act because the alleged trademark infringements did not occur within the United States.[36]On April 12th, 2015, Pirate Joe's Owner, Michael Hallatt was featured on CBS Sunday Morning national newscast where he discussed the lawsuit and took the cameras behind the scenes to show his system of buying Trader Joe’s supplies and hauling them up north to Vancouver, Canada. [37]