A New School Year, A New Set of Projects...

Back to work began around Harvest Moon Festival 🌕🏮 with celebrations kickstarted in my first online class with @learn4lifetdsb Asian Cooking Fall Program with seniors! We made Cantonese chow mein and egg drop mushroom soup, with a discussion on moon cakes that are ubiquitous 😯 in all Asian supermarkets leading up to the occasion.

Aka Mid-Autumn Festival or Lantern Festival (this year on Sept 21st, 2021) is one of the most important annual festivals for the Chinese including the Vietnamese, dating back over 3500 years. A reunion dinner feast with family and gifting of gorgeous moon cakes is part of the tradition. Moon cakes are eaten and exchanged as gifts because they symbolize the roundness of the moon (at its fullest tonight). Moon cakes have a distinctive chrysanthemum pattern, embossed Chinese characters and are conventionally filled with a myriad of variations from red adzuki bean, date, chestnut or lotus paste. The prized ones include a salted duck egg yolk or two.

These days, moon cakes have become a competitive market food with brands out packaging, out flavour-innovating the next. More sophisticated, gourmet and creative with fillings such as fruit jellies, ice cream, savoury beef and even caviar to ante tradition to modern for all moon cake enthusiasts and newbies! 🥮🥮🥮

If you ask me, I still prefer the traditional kind- lotus seed paste with duck egg yolk- a little wedge to enjoy with tea. I suppose I am traditional in the things that matter, and modern in the things that don't 🥰. And preserving tradition through food and culture is one I value innately.

For Koreans, they celebrated Thanksgiving (Chuseok) on the same day as Chinese Harvest Moon Festival. In my following cooking class, we made the classic chewy chap chae sweet potato noodles with a melange of vibrant vegetables and egg ribbons (often served on Chuseok) and nutritious seaweed soup. This is traditionally served during birthdays because nursing moms ate this to recover and to aid in milk production, thus pays homage and respect to your mom enjoying it on your 🎉 day and of course with a side of kimchi 🥣🍲!

The next week, we flew into Japan. We prepared classic miso soup with kombu, bonito flakes cooked delicately and miso paste added at the end (to avoid bitterness) with wakame and tofu, miso-cured cod and baked tofu namero (a plant-based rendition to chopped raw fish) served over rice with green tea and toppings (ochazuke) 🍚🍵.

My other ongoing project -  the first of a new series of cooking demo videos in collaboration with Child/Maternal and Diabetes Care Departments at Toronto's Michael Garron Hospital.

"Hi there, my name is Susan Ng. I am a Chef, Food Educator, Cooking Instructor and a mom to 3 boys. I will be sharing with you material and learnings from Healthy Together. Healthy Together is an innovative and unique family education program that brings together families to learn to make healthier choices and build healthier relationships.

Today, we will cover Breakfast and Better-For-You Drinks. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. We will look at some healthy food ideas and tips to start your family's day off right. We will make crunchy fruit and nut granola, yogurt parfait and breakfast burrito. For drinks, we will look at some simple healthy choices you can make that are delicious and reduce buying sugary prepared drinks on the market such as smoothies and real fruit-infused water!"🍌🍓🥝🍎🥚🍳🌯🥥🥛 

Indigenous educators say children must learn truth before reconciliation. And it goes beyond just one day! On September 30th, TDSB acknowledged the history and legacy of residential schools across this country with the first annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and the 8th annual Orange Shirt Day🧡.  

As a Culinary Consultant and Instructor with TDSB's Newcomer Services, I believe in addition to reeducating our children about the truth of our country's past, we need to be changing our Canadian food conversation to preserve the original way of life of our indigenous communites. Because food. Is. Life. I am happy to share that TDSB is hiring Urban Indigenous Food Sovereignty Instructor/Chefs to impart that knowledge and we have a designated portal with resources from Indigenous Peoples, Elders and Knowledge Keepers for educators and staff.

I had the great opportunity a few years back to attend a Change The Conversation event @foodshareto. For more read my post. The natives original diet was presented to us by Patrick, an aboriginal native. His people were forced into adopting western foods that drastically altered their diets that were dependent on the natural habitats of the forest, fields and water. Game meats were reduced and pollutants contaminated the resources they relied on to obtain their food. Adapting to things like white flour and refined sugars increased their rate of diabetes. And the important tradition of interplanting corn, beans and squash to help sustain the soil diminished. 

With all that's going on about Global Climate Change, preserving soils and waters, aboriginal leaders are being consulted on to create solutions on restoring Mother Earth.  Although we can not change the historical events that occurred on our land, we can only hope together with our leaders they could work to develop a system of mutual aid and support in the struggle for the preservation of our environment and for the maintenance of life. We have indeed so much to learn from our native sisters and brothers 🙏

Let us move beyond words and into action and truly commit ourselves to learning and understanding the importance of truth, reconciliation and reparation. #everychildmatters🧡 

Last but not least- what I have been working steadily on...

It's becoming super real. STAY Tuned!

For the back story, read the end of my post