Welcome to America.  Home of the very big portion sizes, EVERYWHERE.

Our trip to pick up groceries was a specific mission.  We have ONE WEEK here.  The goal is to have all meat products eaten up by then, since clearly our pet parents wouldn’t appreciate us leaving meats here.  And the Border control officers …  do they care?  We know they don’t like it when you try to bring Canadian meats into America (besides the big signs at the border, there were horror stories about the American border control officers going into a bus of kids and pulling the half-eaten hotdogs out of their hands).  So I had to look that up!  And you know what, it’s fine bringing foods into Canada, within certain limits, which were quite reasonable!  But frozen stuff is very well not going to stay frozen in our SUV, so really, we just need to buy smaller portions.

Gee, you know what, I don’t think we can eat ten pounds of chicken wings this week.  Or ten pounds of anything!   It was quite a challenge to find a small package of chicken tenders, but I finally did it.  But when I opened it to cook some for dinner, I discovered that each chicken tender was gigantic!  So instead of having 3 or 4 tenders, we each had only one, the size of a whole chicken breast!

I will confess - I had a secret agenda at the grocery store.  I wanted to buy a bunch of stuff that you can't get in Canada.  Sooooo...  yah, a whole lot of extra things got tossed into the shopping cart. Like dark chocolate hummus.  (I'm especially pleased with that one - it tastes a lot like Nutella, but we can pretend its healthy.)  And the stuff we needed that we can buy at home, I tried to get in different packaging - because we all know sour cream that comes in a squeezy bag is better than having to use a spoon.

Do you know what they do have in the States that they do particularly well?  30 different kinds of butter!  (Who needs 30 different kinds of butter?)  But I do have to confess, I did make several purchases.  Our pet family already had butter at the house, so I didn't technically need any, but now I had to have the Texas Roadhouse Honey Cinnamon Butter!  I restricted myself to that type, but I really wanted the cinnamon butter and the garlic parsley butter and to try the Irish butter (do Irish cows make better cream so their butter tastes better?) 

What else was there?  Chip dip flavours I have never heard of before!  What are we used to?  French onion, and dill pickle.  Maybe some Ranch if we were feeling adventurous.  But look at this! First they have French onion, and then there is Bodacious onion.  What the heck is that?  Jalepeno Cheddar, hmmm.  Buffalo wing flavor (I shouldn't be surprised considering where we are!)  And the one that followed me home – Bacon Horseradish!   (How was it?  A little heavier on the horeradish than the bacon.  You know what would be perfect for it?  Using it as a dip for onion rings!)

And next I slid right into the cream cheese section.  I found myself loading up on the cinnamon brown sugar cream cheese, and the pineapple cream cheese.  I had been searching for Caramel cream cheese, but apparently it’s a seasonal item and they don’t carry it this time of the year; they only carry the usual 20 different types of cream cheese.  Look – they were showing restraint!  (At least they have some – me, not so much…  in spite of being lactose intolerant…)