NEAROF

Bread is cheap. For a little more than a buck, I can buy a sale-priced loaf of basic white bread at my local grocery store. If I boost my budget to a couple of bucks, my choices increase. And for a bit more than $5 per loaf, I can get some pretty fantastic bread from [...]

It’s that time of year again, isn’t it? It’s hard to believe this is the third annual NEAROF! gift guide. Every year, it’s getting harder to write this thing, probably because I’ve included all sorts of great stuff in prior years. Be sure to check out the 2010 guide, as well as the 2011 guide. [...]

Until moving to Calgary, the closest I came to balcony gardening was the flower bed in front of our old apartment in Edmonton’s Belgravia neighbourhood, which the owners actively encouraged us to plant with veggies and herbs. Try as we might, the soil was kind of grotty, and the local rabbits trashed much of the [...]

Who in Canada doesn’t have childhood memories of chomping on Arrowroot cookies, possibly while sipping from a plastic tumbler of apple juice? For some reason, Arrowroot cookies have become the toddler snack of choice. How this connection between children and Arrowroots came to be is beyond me, but the sweet, simple flavour is tasty enough [...]

I’m a pretty half-hearted carnivore. Sure, I like the occasional steak (cooked to well done), and I quite like kebabs, satay, souvlaki, shawarma, donair, gyro, and all manner of marinated chicken breasts, especially cooked on a grill. And chicken tikka? Don’t even get me started. But I don’t need meat every day of my life. [...]

I’d heard great things about Red Racer India Pale Ale from beer-loving friends, but my first sip of the stuff was at Bottlescrew Bill’s, a great Calgary watering hole that caters to the seriously beer-obsessed. How good was it? Here’s a tweet from my experience at the time: “Finally got around to trying Red Racer [...]

I feel silly saying this, but the I think the first time I tried real, honest-to-goodness Turkish delight (a.k.a. lokum) was around five years ago, at Edmonton’s Heritage Festival. I bought a small baggie full of jellied Turkish delight cubes at a pavilion that, I think, belonged to one of the “-stans.” I had no [...]

There’s something magical about the first Slurpee of the season, isn’t there? The sweet, frosty, icy, slushy soft drink is a staple of the summer season in this part of the world, and there is much to celebrate on the first day warm enough to enjoy one outside, on a walk through the neighbourhood. Nothing [...]