Niagara Grocery

Niagara Grocery is located in beautiful, historic James Bay. Victoria BC’s oldest grocery store; updated! The corner grocery is alive and well in Victoria. There’s still a place where you can buy local produce, daily bread, artisan cheese & sausage, and house-roasted coffees. Niagara Grocery in James Bay has been transformed from a tried convenience [...]
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Niagara Grocery

Rhubarb Custard Bars

Chef Heidi Fink is a professional chef, food writer, cooking instructor, and Mom. She recently shared this fabulous recipe for rhubarb, which in turn she credits to Ciara Dooley of Kildara Farms. Now, no one has ever accused me of over-praising rhubarb. Sure, it’s a beautiful vegetable with its deep red stalks and pale green/white [...]

Asparagus

With asparagus comes Spring. This delicately-flavored perennial—especially its first few pencil-thin shoots–is the promise of a new season. We’ve cooked this vegetable dozens of ways, in soups, quiches, even stir-fries, but we’ve found the simplest way is often the best: on the grill. Trim any thick or woody bottoms from the spears, or use a [...]

Stinging Nettles

Apart from the inconvenient fact that they sting, nettles are a delicious & healthy ingredient in soups, pasta dishes, risotto, omelets—basically any cooked dish where you would use young spinach. They’re well worth the modest challenge of picking them, as they’re rich in vitamin C, calcium, potassium, flavonoids, histamine, and serotonin—all the nutrients you [...]

Clockwise from top: Ambrosia, Spartan, Golden Delicious, Fuji, Braeburn, Granny Smith. Center: Gala.

Apples to Apples

Peter Simonsen pulled up in his pickup this week with a thousand pounds of fresh-picked apples from his organic orchard in Keremeos, BC. Now a half ton of apples is bound to draw some attention, so a small crowd soon gathered to sample and compare the different varieties, from Pink Ladies to Braeburns. Here’s a [...]

Leek & Potato Casserole

Jan’s Leek & Potato Casserole What is it about the crisp, dwindling days of autumn and our sudden craving for root vegetables? Perhaps they’re the quintessential hunker-down-and-get-warm comfort food. Here’s a particularly soul-satisfying dish from our very own produce princess, Jan Wachtin. 8 medium russet potatoes 3 medium leeks 2 tbs butter 2 cloves garlic 2 [...]

L’oeuf Story

Brown, white, free-range, free-run, omega, gluten-free…? Okay, I made the last one up, but the truth is customers often ask about the many types of eggs on the market, and which is “better”. Here’s a brief guide to the eggs we carry at Niagara Grocery & Fairfield Market, all of them local: Conventional eggs (Farmer [...]

We’re Number 3!

It’s been three years this week since Jen & I began the adventure that is Niagara Grocery. What possessed a couple of naïve keeners like us to buy a run-down, 102-year-old corner store I’ll never really know. There were onions in the candy rack, the back room was packed with old cardboard, and there were [...]

Chalk One Up

Awhile back I knocked together a sandwich board from some discarded lumber, and painted it with chalkboard paint. Aside from the obvious “Local cucumbers just arrived” or “Coffee and muffin only two bucks,” I’d chalk the odd food quote or (to my mind, anyway) witty pun. Well it didn’t take long for the sign to [...]

Kid Stuff

Hi, I’m Nina McKimmie, age 10, and I’ve tasted almost everything in Niagara Grocery. Here is my top five list of foods that kids would like (and they happen to be good for you!) Bull Kelp by Dakini Tidal Winds. Trust me, seaweed is yummy: salty and a little bit chewy. Bull kelp is a [...]

Cabbage Tops

We love braising greens: kale, chard, collards, rapini. dandelion, spinach… But I’ve never cooked with cabbage tops. They’re the second, leafy growth from cabbage plants after the familiar round head is picked. Like a lot of early-season vegetables they’re here and gone within a week or two. So when a box of fresh-picked cabbage tops [...]

About

The corner grocery is alive and well in Victoria. There’s still a place where you can buy local produce, daily bread, artisan cheese & sausage, and house-roasted coffees. Niagara Grocery in James Bay has been transformed from a tried convenience store into an award-winning neighborhood market.

Open: Monday to Friday 8am – 7pm / Saturday 9am – 7pm / Sunday 10am – 6pm

250 383 1223

Get Fresh with a Local

Niagara Grocery