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There's still one more week of March, but I pretty much quit this challenge right after I started. I barely made it a few days before breaking the March rule: only buy food from locally owned businesses. I don't think this was a waste of my time though, as I did learn a few things. First, I value convenience over all - over price, over time and over location. Second, it's easier to find locally owned restaurants than it is to find locally owned food marts, at least in my neighbourhood. Third, chain grocery stores trump locally owned stores in terms of variety (and in one case, lack of expired chocolate chips!). Fourth, I live in a food desert, and I'm mostly too lazy to go beyond my neighbourhood borders for groceries, though I'll go farther afield for restaurants. Pretty sure I'll keep trying to eat a locally owned restaurants. I feel that's a mostly manageable and sustainable goal. Groceries though, well I'll keep going to my chain supermarket for dair...

Oh wow I suck at this... Groceries On Thursday evening I needed to grab cookies for work on Friday and vegetables for Roller Derby Officials Rules Night BBQ. I was halfway done my shopping when I realized I was at Safeway and wasn't even allowed to be there! Major fail. I totally forgot. Safeway is just so damn convenient! Sure I could've gone to H&W , but then where would I have gotten the cookies? Two stops. Sigh. Oh the guilt. Saturday though I only needed fruit and bread so it was H&W for the win! Restaurants I didn't eat out at all this week. Miscellaneous I bought some vitamins from Optimum Health , which is a local chain of health food shops. And I bought some delicious natural sausages from them too. Random thing to have in a vitamin store! So yes, I failed again. But it did make me realize something: I value convenience over everything else, over time, over location, over money. I've still got two weeks left in this month, and though I'm pretty sur...

Week 2 was somewhat less eventful than week 1 , but annoying nonetheless. Groceries So annoying. For my weekly shop I needed fruits/vegetables, which I happily got from my local green grocer H&W  - they were giving away a 10lb bag of potatoes if you spent $30, but since the deals are so good I never spend more than $10, I didn't have to lug home a bag of potatoes to eat for 2 months. From there I went straight to Elsafadi Market . Last week , I went to Safeway first, felt guilty, then went to Elsafadi and found everything I needed there anyway. This week was the opposite. I only needed beef, almond milk, butter and chocolate chips. That's it. They had butter, but it was kind of smushed. They miraculously had chocolate chips, but they had expired 3 months ago. And they didn't have almond milk. Ok, so I could go back to regular milk, but they didn't have that really either - they only carry 2%, 3% and homogenized. Um. No. Not drinking full fat milk. So I walked out. I...

My first week of buying food from local vendors turned out mostly good, with minimal guilt! Groceries I was near the southside location of Earth's General Store  on my way back from the airport last Monday, so I stopped in to get my weekly groceries. I'm pretty well stocked at home so only needed fruit and a few other ingredients. Earth's General Store is a locally owned organic shop with huge environmental leanings. I've shopped there on occasion for years for various things like my stainless steel Klean Kanteen water bottle, natural and chemical free shampoos and soap and other health supplies, and it's my go to place for bulk soaps etc to fill empty containers. But I don't usually shop there for food, mostly because the southside location is not convenient, and while the downtown store is closer, I'd have to really plan a trip on my bike properly to haul stuff home. Their fruit was more expensive than my local H&W produce market , but it was good qual...

I spend about two weeks a year working curling events around small city western Canada. While I'm there, I always try to visit local restaurants - I'd much rather give my money to a local, small business than a mediocre big box chain restaurant. Some of my favourite curling vacation eateries include Eats Amore food truck in Kamloops, the Gallery Cafe in Moose Jaw, and most recently El Norteno for tacos and Grande Prairie Coffee Company for sweet treats while in Grande Prairie last week. In Edmonton, of course my regular favourite place for lunch around campus is Filistix  - I make a weekly pilgrammage out to building nine for their solid coleslaw and tasty entrees. The guys have been really good to us over the years, and part of the reason I love going there for lunch is because they remember our names and treat us like friends instead of customers. But that's it. While I often profess my hatred for chain food, I don't make that much of an effort to eat out at more ...

Balcony Garden 2013 was the year of trial and error on my balcony, and error mostly won out. The wooden "pallet garden" my dad made for me was mostly a fail, except the violas did well on the top row. And I did get one salad's worth of mini radishes. But the cat grass, lettuce, swiss chard and spinach either got ruined by pests or never came up. Those were all on the bottom two rows, so maybe that had something to do with it. I think the main problem was it was so shallow - at only 2 inches deep. Too bad, it was a great climbing gym for the cats. It's bound for the recycling bin.  Though I thought it was dying after the June cold snap, my basil ended up coming back and flourishing. I got 28 servings of pesto out of it, so that actually was a win! I used almonds in the pesto because I'm too cheap to buy pine nuts, and I didn't use any parmesan, but it's delicious! Basil pesto, ready to be frozen in single serving portions in ice cube trays. Another win: my...

I love succulents. These two are doing really well on my balcony. The hanging one I bought at a plant sale last fall and it's wintered on my windowsill. It loves it outside though! The little red flowers hang down about a foot! But... *sigh* For the second year in a row, my balcony garden is a bit of a failure. I thought the shallow planter my dad made that I added to my balcony wouldn't drain well and would get swampy. The opposite has happened - it's so shallow the plants drink up the water so quickly that on hot days I have to water twice so everything doesn't wilt! The violas are doing well, they spring back if they wilt and are generally filling up their row colourfully. The second row however, as you can see in the photo, is dead. This was my basil - my favourite part of the garden. We've mostly had rainy, grey, and cold days this June. Apparently that's not optimal growing conditions for baby basil. I picked what I could before the stalks turned brown and...

It's officially time to plant my balcony garden! This year, I'm trying something different. In the past I've planted a lot of little pots. This led to a big jungle of a garden, but I never used half of it either because I'd planted crops which I never ended up eating or the bugs got to it first! So I decided to try a pallet garden this year. I asked my dad to help me find a pallet, but he insisted on making me a vertical garden to size. This was very nice of him, and he even added a bit of customization - but the planter is a heavy beast! Because I'm worried the weight will break my balcony (shh, don't tell the rest of the inmates), and because there is the potential for a lot of edibles, I decided to just plant my enormous vertical garden with violas, basil, lettuce, spinach, radishes and swiss chard, plus two zucchini. I'm a bit worried the vertical garden is too shallow, so I'm not sure if anything will grow well. We'll see. A friend also swappe...