No Frills Heaven

Our grocery shopping run into Ktown usually involves two or three places to pick up groceries.  The cheapest and first stop is Walmart for milk, boxed and jarred goods, some frozen items and bread.  Then we head to Wholesale for whatever Walmart didn't have in stock, fresh veggies and fruit and meats.  Then, we would head either to Extra Foods or Safeway (the most expensive!) for whatever else was left on the grocery list not found in the first two grocery stores.  To be honest, shopping this way takes the fun out of cooking.  I had always wished that Ktown would get one grocery store that carried everything we needed at reasonable prices.  And that carried flat-leaf Italian parsley (a staple in a lot of my home cooking).  Apparently the palates here in Northern Ontario like curly parsley, but not flat leaf parsley (as I've been told by a number of produce managers over the few years we've been here).  In TO, we could walk (!) to the nearest Food Basics and buy whatever we needed for meals, including flat leaf parsley.  And the variety of fruits and vegetables, wow! 

Then, this weekend, I walked into heaven.  The Extra Foods grocery store had recently been converted into a No Frills store.  Now, you might think that a No Frills store seems to be a low end grocery store, but, compared to where we have had to get our groceries (aside from the extrememly overpriced Safeway), it's not.  In fact, it felt like stepping into a TO grocery store for the first time in three years.  It's brightly lit, well stocked, reasonably priced, carries a multitude of products, and get this: I was able to buy FLAT LEAF PARSLEY for the first time in three years.  So, no more driving all over Ktown for groceries (which the family hated).  We now have a one stop shop.  That means more time for the library, hanging out at the parks, and Tim Horton's, and...