NEAROF

I adore Hawaii. I love the sunshine, the people, the atmosphere, and the effortlessly tropical/Polynesian/Asian/American melange of the place. I’ve been to Hawaii often enough to know what I’m missing when I’m not there. And what’s just about the first thing I do after I arrive on the long-haul flight from Canada? I grab a [...]

In case you haven’t read the FAQ, I live in the city of Edmonton, a nice metro area of about a million people in the province of Alberta, Canada. In the sunny months of summer, it’s a lovely place to live — but winters here are no fun at all. From November to late April, [...]

Adorable! That’s what I think of these crazy new cake-on-a-stick things at Starbucks. Near as I can tell, they showed up at my local Starbucks in the middle of March, placed prominently in the pastry case in a spot I couldn’t ignore. As you’ll see in the photo above, they’re eye-catching little golf-ball-sized chunks of [...]

As we’ve already established, I quite like pears, and I quite like Ikea. Combine the two, and you’ve got a tall can of non-alcoholic pear drink — Kolsyrad Parondryck by name — available at the Ikea food store. The look and texture are not like a standard pear juice. It’s not thick with pear pulp, [...]

Part of the fun of having a site like this is getting tips from readers. Back when I wrote about Terry’s Chocolate Orange in December, commenter Darrell pointed me in the direction of several other orange-infused chocolate bars, including this lovely specimen from Cocoa Camino. See, Terry’s Chocolate Orange is great, but it’s not available [...]

Back in the day, pop was sweetened with sugar, a delicious form of sweetness that brought out the best in soft drinks like Pepsi and Coke. Then business got in the way of pleasure, leading to corn syrup, a cheap and plentiful sweetener, replacing sugar in all sorts of things, including pop. While most average [...]

I’ve tried a whole pile of different Reese’s products in the past, from various bar-form treats to cereal to tubs of peanut butter, but I’d never seen Reese’s Dark Chocolate and Reese’s White Chocolate peanut butter cups until a trip to Seattle late last fall. So? How do they compare to the regular Reese’s peanut [...]

Popcorn is good. Toffee-covered popcorn is also good. And, it turns out, milk-chocolate-covered toffee-covered popcorn is also pretty darn fine. At the centre of each piece of Trader Joe’s Milk Chocolate Covered Toffee Popcorn is a fluffy, dense piece of popcorn. It’s the lightest element in the concoction, which gains its heft by being weighed [...]