I bought a huge leg of lamb last week (enough for three meals) and on Thursday I was really feeling like a lamb curry, but couldn’t find a recipe that jumped out at me and decided on the Mediterranean Braised Lamb with Couscous instead. This meant trying to find couscous in our mall that has very little available where groceries are concerned. I didn’t find couscous, but I found something that I didn’t expect in a shop that I didn’t expect either.

Firstly, you do get South African food (or food that is familiar to South Africans) in the Canadian grocery stores. There is Marmite (found with the spices) and Lyle’s Golden Syrup (found at the baking section in most stores I’ve been to) – both manufactured in the UK though. For the real deal you have to go to one of the South African shops (we have one relatively nearby and go there once every couple of months for our biltong and green Cream Soda fix and to get stuff like Mrs Ball’s chutney and Aromat). Surprisingly most grocery stores carry Ceres fruit juice (just REALLY expensive).

My quest to find couscous for dinner, led me to London Drugs. Now, this is quite an interesting little store (little because the floor space relative to range of products, is small). Funny enough, the chain does not have a single store in London, ON or London, UK (although it was named after London, UK) – you will actually not find a single one east of Manitoba. Then, the only drugs you will find is the prescription kind in a section that probably takes up less than 5% of the floor space.

What you will find, though, is everything from high-end camera equipment to furniture, to gas barbecues and, believe it or not, Something South African cook-in curry sauces. Why I found this unlikely? London Drugs have only one aisle in the whole store dedicated to groceries, so the last thing I thought I would find, is about 10% of that aisle dedicated to international foods. The big grocery chains normally have about one side of an aisle out of the whole shop dedicated to international foods. And the majority of the food will be Indian or Asian.

I did not buy it though. And unfortunately, from reviews that I read online, the sauces are quite bland, so I will continue mixing my own curries for now. As for the couscous, we had rice instead (but it is definitely on my shopping list again).