As far as I’m concerned, Starbucks popularized the cold, sweet, milky coffee market, and brought it into the mainstream. Sure, some of us knew about Mr. Brown Iced Coffee before the Frappuccino landed, and other products innovated long before Starbucks […]
Tag: summer
Arbitrary: Why I love my balcony garden
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 […]
Recipe: Authentic Burkina Faso bissap drink
If you’ve travelled the roads of West Africa, you’ve no doubt seen the vendors streetside, at bus stations and at the markets, all selling little tied-shut plastic baggies full of deep-red-purple juice. In Burkina Faso, it’s called bissap, and it’s […]
Review: American Vintage Hard Iced Tea
While I don’t mind a glass of sweet iced tea from time to time, occasionally spiked with a wee bit of vodka for weekend sipping, it’s not typically a drink I reach for on a regular basis. But an intriguing […]
Arbitrary: So, you’re a vegetarian. Why buy a BBQ?
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? […]
Review: Alley Kat Aprikat beer
During the winter months, I gravitate toward big, heavy, complicated beers, with lots of roasty, toasty, malty flavour. It’s the liquid equivalent of curling up under a nice, comfortable blanket with a good book while a roaring fire blazes on […]
Review: Wild Rose Brewery Velvet Fog
Cloudy beer scares most North Americans. Why? Who knows. Maybe folks here are so used to micro-filtered megabrews that they can’t fathom beers you can’t see through. Even wheat beers, a category where all sorts of amazing beers are murky […]
Review: St. Ambroise Framboise raspberry ale
I quite like the St. Ambroise pale ale made by Montreal’s McAuslan Brewing, a beer that grew on me during repeated visits to Quebec. From watching shows in makeshift venues at Pop Montreal to reading the paper at Ziggy’s on […]