What do Canadians eat in a day?
Canadians eat a quick breakfast, a light lunch around noon and their main meal at dinner around 18:00, with regional dishes like poutine in Quebec and seafood on both coasts.
Typical dishes and their calories
Breakfast
On weekdays breakfast is quick: cereal, toast, oatmeal, or a coffee and a breakfast sandwich on the way to work. At weekends it is pancakes or French toast with maple syrup, eggs and bacon. Montreal bagels, smaller, denser and sweeter than New York ones and baked in a wood fired oven, are about 270 kcal plain.
Lunch
Lunch is around noon and usually light: a sandwich, soup, a salad or leftovers from home. In Toronto the peameal bacon sandwich is a classic, cured pork loin rolled in cornmeal on a soft bun. Montreal has smoked meat sandwiches piled high with spiced brisket and mustard.
Dinner
Dinner is the main meal, often around 18:00. A family dinner is meat or fish with potatoes and vegetables, pasta or a stir fry, and big cities eat a lot of Chinese, South Asian and other food brought by immigrants. On the coasts it is salmon in British Columbia and lobster and mussels in the Maritimes.
Starters
Meals at home rarely have a starter. In pubs and restaurants appetizers like chicken wings, nachos or a bowl of soup come first. In the Maritimes seafood chowder is a common opener, and in Quebec a meal may start with yellow pea soup, a dish from the early French settlers.
Desserts
Butter tarts, small pastry cups filled with butter, sugar, syrup and egg, are about 330 kcal each, and Ontario has a butter tart trail. The Nanaimo bar from British Columbia has three layers: a crumb and coconut base, custard icing and chocolate on top. Quebec has tarte au sucre, a sugar pie.
Drinks
Coffee is the daily drink, and Tim Hortons pours most of the brewed coffee sold in Canada. A double double is a coffee with two creams and two sugars. Beer is the most common alcoholic drink, and the Caesar, made with vodka and clam tomato juice, is the national cocktail, created in Calgary in 1969.
Street food
Poutine came from rural Quebec in the late 1950s: fries, squeaky cheese curds and hot gravy, about 750 kcal for a regular portion. It is sold everywhere from snack bars to fast food chains. BeaverTails, flat fried dough with cinnamon sugar, are sold at outdoor rinks, and Toronto calls its street hot dogs street meat.
Normal there, odd elsewhere
In spring people go to a sugar shack, a cabane à sucre, for ham, beans, eggs and pancakes covered in maple syrup, then roll hot syrup on snow into taffy. Quebec makes more than 70 percent of the world's maple syrup. Thanksgiving falls on the second Monday of October, six weeks before the American one.