Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada.. a beautful but barren place at a times

I truly adore the fact that most of the time, you can just walk into a store and get darn near anything you could want and most of the time a few hundred things you don’t really want or need..

However in the past year, I have been a bit surprised at finding some things in short supply, the first one that really hit my radar was lemon Juice.. Now I know that it might seem like a odd thing to notice but it turns out that most lemon’s are sold for fresh use, and only ten percent or so of lemons go to make Lemon Juice..

well in 2008 they had a very bad crop,or so it said on google when I read up on it. It was because of a freeze that ruined a good percent of the crops, now how this was figured out is that a ton of canning recipes ask for you to use Lemon Juice, and not the fresh ones because they don’t have the same ability to have a set acid level..

Store after Store after Store, sold out, and with little hand written notes saying they didn’t have any in back and it was back ordered..  We lucked out, and found a small store at one of the little villages that had six bottles and I snapped them all up, but even so, I had to play with using vinager’s in certain recipes that year to make up the loss..  and got me to thinking.. how would I replace that acid in my recipes if needed to do so.. Vinagers appear to be the answer, but I will straight up say, they effect the overall flavors of the canned goods, I am not meaning they are bad, just that they come out different.

Last Christmas, the one that we hunted store after store was Filburts aka Hazenuts, we wanted raw nuts, salted or unsalted would be fine.. we could find them in products but not the nut itself.. it was odd.. Even some of the bags of nuts where missing them.. google to the rescue.. turns out that about 90 percent of all hazenuts in N.A. are all processed at the same plant, and they had a massive outbreak that caused the nuts to be contaminated, and the whole place and season shut down..WOW.. Anyone think maybe just maybe that you should not have ‘All your nuts in the same basket”  Haha.. couldn’t resist that line.. sorry.

This year it was pickling cucumbers, my own crop was so-so, good enough but I wanted to process more, so I started watching local farmers markets and the local stores, who are surprisingly good about normally have fresh produces from our province.. lots of english cucumbers but no pickling.. finally start asking everywhere I go.. nope, nope, nope.. failure of crops.  So its no surprise to me that the cost of pickles in the stores have gone up.. I have been tracking it locally, the general overall cost of the same jar of pickles last year is 60 cents higher.

Wonder if those prices will come down next year if we have a bumper crop of pickle cucumbers but somehow I doubt it..