NEAROF

These three chocolate bars were all gifted to NEAROF! by my dad, who bought them during a trip to Seattle. All look to be delicious, flavourful treats, yet all are hard to find in this corner of Canada. Trying exotic foodstuffs with limited availability can be fraught with mental anguish. If you don’t like the [...]

Somewhere along the way, yogurt went from delicious, nutritious food to processed pseudo-food, a scientific experiment that spiralled out of control. See, bad things happen when you start counting calories obsessively. When faced with two yogurts on a dairy-case shelf, one that’s 250 calories per serving and another that’s 100, health-minded label-readers often pick the [...]

It’s hard to win with fruit beers. Some are sweet and sticky, verging on a cooler or cider. The best ones in this category are bursing with ripe fruit with a trace of malt and hops; the worst are the ones that hit you over the head with nasty, tinny, cloying artificial flavour better suited [...]

If there’s one small quibble I have with blackberries, it’s the seeds. There are lots and lots and lots of seeds. They’re tough, crunchy little beasts, liable to get lodged between teeth until being painstakingly plucked away with a toothpick. Blackberry jam, while delicious, sometimes suffers from the too-many-seeds problem. That’s why blackberry jelly is [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the west coast lately. I adore British Columbia, from the breathtaking natural beauty of isolated Bella Coola, to the inner-harbour strolls of Victoria. Blackberries are one of the things that define my mental image of B.C. I’ve picked buckets and buckets of them over the years, staining my hands [...]