Valerie G. Barnes Connell Jordan
Northern Advocate
Using ingredients that are on hand, making jam, and cooking over the open fire have been part of a series of cooking extravaganzas offered over the summer months.
On July 12, Jodi Robson, who hosts a cooking show on CTV in the mornings from Regina and shares one, Big Hearts Small Towns, with the Saskatchewanderer, started visiting communities across the province, sharing her cooking expertise.
Robson is a member of Okanese First Nation, one of the File Hills Tribal Council nations, so is Cree Nakota. She lived on her First Nation until she was 16, then moved to her father’s First Nation, Carry the Kettle. These are the communities where she began her cooking journey.
“I’m taught in the kitchens of my kohkums and aunties,” she said in an interview with the Northern Advocate, adding she’s been cooking in one way or another for almost 30 years.
Robson co-hosts a cooking show, Big Hearts Small Towns, where she travels with the Saskatchewanderer.
“We cook in different communities, using their regional recipes and integrating it with my own,” she said.
Robson was in La Ronge to share her knowledge with a group of interested cooking enthusiasts. The program is funded through the Lac La Ronge Indian Band (LLRIB) and designed to explore ways of contending with food insecurity at the La Ronge Senior Centre.
The menu? Bison meatballs, wild rice and root vegetables.
As participants arrived, Robson introduced herself and quickly got people organized to cook.
She believes hands-on is the only way to do it, so, everyone took on a piece of the meal preparation and each participant was responsible for their own meal.
“I intend to not just stand there and prepare stuff in front of people and have them just watch,” she explained. “Everybody will be helping. It will be a collective … I learnt growing up it was hands on…. I find that’s the greatest teacher. It allows for corrections for yourself, so if this didn’t turn out the way I wanted it, to know I do it differently in the future. It’s the best learning tool, really.”
Participants in the event all took on different roles to make the meal, shared in eating the food and went home with some lovely bison meatballs, wild rice and vegetables.
On July 18, a group gathered at the Senior’s Centre to make a batch of Blueberry Jam, led by Elder Jane Kemp.
Again, participants took part in preparing the berries, and bottling the jam when it was finished. It was a little more difficult to do the cooking, so Elder Kemp did take on that role.
Chef Jenni Lessard nourished her love of cooking in her mother’s kitchen at Lamp Lake, a small community a short distance north of La Ronge.
She is Métis. After leaving home and working in Jasper for four years, she came back to Birch Hills, which is close to ancestral home which is also close to St. Louis. While in Jasper, Lessard decided she wanted to have a restaurant, she rented a small space in Birch Hills.
“It was 14 ft and I could reach the cash drawer and the sink at the same time,” she said.
There, she served bannock, coffee and different types of soup every day, and it “got popular cause I was using local ingredients.”
Then Lessard was able to get a loan and purchase a 100-year-old building across the street, which she renovated to “wood floors and tin ceiling,” and “I think in eight years we had 76 live music events there, where we paid musicians. I would do all local foods and some from up here,” she said.
She also did themed meals, for example, using honey, so honey would be used in every dish or course for a meal.
She sold the restaurant and moved into Saskatoon and did catering for another eight years and because the executive chef at Wanuskewin.
“I did that until half way through the Pandemic, and then was ready for a new adventure,” she explained.
She is now what she calls, a Culinary Consultant.
“What that is creating menus, recipes and experiences for everything from lodges, to hospitals, to restaurants” and now Lessard has created the Field to Shield Culinary Tour.
The Culinary tour involves starting in Saskatoon, as she did recently with a group of German tourists, going into Batoche andElk Ridge.
“We eat all the way up,” she said. “I tell them about the ingredients that grow from the Prairie field to the Canadian Shield.”
The cultural interpretation is provided by Grandmother’s Bay folks and the tour involves a trapline tour, fishing and berry picking and ends with a four-course meal.
Lessard said she’s hoping to create a lot of interest in Indigenous culinary traditions.
“That’s who I am. That’s what I do,” she said to participants in the out-of-doors cooking experience at Heritage Park in Air Ronge Aug. 23.
Participants joined together to prepare vegetables, a meat and lentil dish, frying fresh pickerel, a blueberry desert, salad, a lemonade drink, all created outside in the park.
This was the last cooking event planned for the series.
