Students from St. Anne’s and St. Michael Catholic secondary schools had the rare opportunity to hone their cooking skills while learning more about Indigenous cuisine during a special cooking class Friday.
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Chef David Wolfman, a member of the Xaxli’p First Nation in BC and a culinary arts professor at George Brown College, was at St. Mike’s to teach the eager group — a mix of dual-credit foods program students and multicultural club members — several Indigenous fusion dishes.
Madison Garcia, a Grade 12 student at St. Mike’s and member of the multicultural club, said she thought the class was “a really cool” idea when she heard the event was taking place
“My main focus is to promote diversity and to basically bring awareness to these kind of things, especially with people who are not quite welcome or feel like they’re a minority, especially since Stratford is the mostly white town, so this kind of brings in some of the culture,” Garcia said.
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Wolfman, who has taken part in previous presentations to schools in the board, brings a lot of energy when he’s involved with the program, said Lauren Coughlin, has specialist high skills major teacher at St. Mike’s.
“He brings his own kind of flair to cooking, and we’ve had really great feedback in the past, so we wanted to give our students another opportunity to learn from a master chef,” she said.
Wolfman developed his skills in cooking as an apprentice, and later learned more about his Indigenous heritage, so decided to combine the two in his work. Among the dishes he taught the students on Friday were buffalo egg rolls, curried elk and maple pumpkin cupcakes.
“What I like to do is what’s called Indigenous fusion, where we still respect our Indigenous culture and the foods and the ways of both harvesting and sharing, but also marry it into modern techniques,” said Wolfman, who hosts his own television show, Cooking with the Wolfman, on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. The chef also told students about the possibilities offered by a career in the culinary trades, as well as the benefits of the Ontario Youth Apprenticeship Program.
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“Today I’m talking about culinary trades, which are baking, cooking, chef, as well as many others. But also to inform them that, you know, trades are really important, especially in Ontario,” Wolfman said.
For Garcia, the baking part was easy. Cooking the elk, however, was more of a challenge.
“Elk is, very tough, and that’s not something I’ve ever worked with. . . (but) I’m excited to try it, and it’s exciting to learn,” she said.
Exposing the students at the school to different cultures is an important thing for St. Mike’s to provide, said Coughlin noting there is an Indigenous population at the Stratford school.
“We’re bringing cultures together — traditions together — and we’re celebrating our similarities through cooking (and) our differences through different recipes and through different histories of food. And it’s just a wonderful opportunity for people to come together and celebrate all that Canada has to offer,” she said.
Depending on how you look at it, this day of sharing could also have an element of reconciliation to it, Wolfman added.
“Some people may look at this as a way of reconciliation — to understand Indigenous people, with Indigenous ways and Indigenous foods. I think that the reconciliation is definitely in there because a lot of people will make the assumption, ‘Oh, those people just lived off the land,’ and they didn’t,” he said, noting sustainability has always been a core part of agricultural indigenous practices.
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