As many of you know, we love to eat and cook good food and help it down with nice wine. Now we have had 4 months of finding different places to buy food and wine and visit restaurants and we have developed our favourites. We love the food we buy from Spud.ca – an internet grocery that delivers on Mondays. They specialise on organic and local food. On every order there is an average distance from Calgary where the items are coming from and normally it is about 3 times less than if we’d bought the items from a regular brick and mortar supermarket. We get organic and local apples, new carrots and radishes, organic bread and free-range chicken breasts and grass-fed bison steaks. Some of the more exotic fruits and veg like mango and avocado come from Mexican organic farms. Asparagus is in season and comes from California. We have developed an addiction to Portabellini mushrooms from BC – grilled with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper and a drop of truffle oil – seriously so good that my mouth waters right now just thinking of them. We pair them with either grass-fed beefsteaks or habanero chilli sausages – from Irvings Farm in Alberta. Sometimes my husband makes sweet potato and onion mash – fantastic alternative to regular potatoes and so much more vitamins! These are our staples that we order every week right now.

Being allergic to dairy, I have fortunately found alternatives from goat milk – cheese and even yoghurt – my favourite is goat yoghurt with Saskatoon berries that is made in Fort Mcleod, Alberta. These goats live like kings according to the description of the farm – no hormones, best quality of hay and oats and barley and corn and even a dose of flax seed! I can definitely say that the yoghurt tastes like it has come from happy goats :).

Another of my favourite products is handmade salt spring island goat cheese – it is goat cheese brie more delicate and slightly saltier than the cow milk brie. My husband who has always loved ‘normal’ cheese is also really liking the goat cheese brie. We pair it with a glass of wine and rhubarb chutney – another local product from Saucy Ladies Inc, Lethbridge, Alberta.

Wine don’t buy online yet. We stock up from different liquor stores in our neighbourhood, but recently we were referred to a great wine store in Inglewood, Calgary that sells wines to most of the restaurants in Calgary and also regular consumers via their store and also online. Their prices are lower when you buy in bulk, but we don’t have that much room and the best conditions for keeping the wine in our flat. So far we have just gone there and bought a case that was gone amazingly quick. That’s another reason – the less wine we keep at home, the less we drink.

We definitely prefer our own homecooked food (my husband is the main cook, I get to make some dinners and sometimes salad), but when we want to go out for a good burger, then there is no better place than our local – Buchanan’s. When we want some Chinese then there is Happy Valley central on the Centre str – excellent duck! The best Indian is in Edmonton for sure, but for some good Indian we go to Kensington. They also have some arabic Swawarmas that I have for lunch sometimes when I don’t feel like cooking and there are no leftovers from the day before to warm up.

We are definitely happy with the food and wine here now that we have found the places to buy from. When we came the food bills were 50% higher and that was mainly because we did not know where to buy from and we eat out a lot. The impulse factor is also a lot smaller when you buy online and we don’t duplicate things we already have. On Sundays, my husband makes a soup from all of the greens that we haven’t eaten during the week and this soup is really delicious and lasts us for a few days. It also helps us to keep the weight at a manageable level.