Karen Anderson

We are celebrating! For six summers now, we’ve kept two beehives with the help of our mentor Eliese Watson the founder of Apiaries and Bees for Communities . Five years ago we moved the bees to the garden of our business partner Rouge Restaurant in Inglewood and both the garden and the bees are better for it. Rouge owners Paul Rogalski and Olivier Reynaud say that the bees have clearly doubled the pollination and harvest yield of their garden. Last year, we harvested 80 pound of honey from our two hives and left that much more for the bees to overwinter on. Beekeeping is a skill that requires mentoring.   As president of Alberta Food Tours, I was moved to start keeping bees when I heard that although large commercial scale bees were suffering colony collapse disorder, urban bees, with…

Elk Island has 800 bison, 300 elk, 200 deer and about 1000 beavers in Canada’s only full fenced national park. The park is only a 30 minute drive from downtown Edmonton and is 194 square kilometres in size. One of our country’s oldest parks, early naturalists recognized the unique character of this land in what is known as the beaver hills. Formed by a collision of three glaciers, rolling hills and thousands of sloughs and ponds were left behind in this small district which is completely surrounded by Prairie otherwise. Our Edmonton Food Tours team – Karen Anderson, Liane Faulder, Cindy Lazarenko, Suzanne Dennis, Howard Kowalchuk and Debra Anzinger –  pulled in on a windless, 25 degree Celsius Saturday evening. It had been a dry summer so there were no mosquitos to pester and only the promise of a dinner laden…

Calgary’s food culture is greatly enhanced by the fact that one in six Albertans are born outside of Canada. Chef Roy Oh, owner and chef at Anju Restaurant, was born in Edmonton but his parents immigrated from Korea. Chef Oh learned to cook from his mother. And from a few years at the school of hard…

  Calgary Arts Development has recognized Calgary Food Tours owner Karen Anderson as a Calgarian living a creative life that contributes to the overall development of the city. The Storytelling Project in which Karen is featured raises awareness about Calgarians who, by living creative lives, are making Calgary a better city, effecting positive change and enriching others’…

Country Guide Magazine February 16, 2016 Thanks going out to writer Steven Biggs who interviewed our founder Karen Anderson at length—and dug deep into her writing career —to portray the full impact of her work as a food writer and founder, owner and CEO of Calgary Food Tours and Alberta Food Tours, Inc. Catch the…

Alberta Food Tours has been proud to feature The Silk Road Spice Merchants on our Calgary – Inglewood Edibles – Made by Mavericks – food tours for many years. So it is with great delight that Alberta Food Tours owner Karen Anderson and her cookbook partner Noorbanu Nimji at A Spicy Touch announce a partnership…

A Spicy Touch – Family Favourites from Noorbanu Nimji’s Kitchen was recently launched and today was noted as one of the top cookbooks of 2015 in The Calgary Herald’s Cooking the Books – Cream of the Crop piece by Gwendolyn Richards. Alberta Food Tours, Inc. founder, president and CEO, Karen Anderson worked nine years with…

Flood magazine’s Laura Studarus wrote a piece on Calgary Food Tours as her choice in the magazine staff pick’s for The Best of 2014. It’s a pretty big deal when one of the major voices for “all things culture” in Los Angeles writes an article raving about a food tour in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Especially…

For their crazy dedication to coffee terroir, coffee roasting for the pure flavour of the bean and artful hand-pulled barista coffees at their cafes around Calgary – Phil and Sebastian Coffee Roasters has become one of the great Food Artisans of Alberta. You can read more about how they helped our President and CEO’s, Karen Anderson with…

Alberta is reinventing itself as a culinary destination – You Are Where You Eat Sep 16, 2014 by Alix Kemp The local food movement has taken off in Alberta, evidenced by an exploding interest in farmers’ markets, increasing numbers of restaurants that boast locally sourced produce and a growing contingent of food-centric festivals. But it…