in Chatsworth, Grey Highlands, Southgate, West Grey
June 27, 2022
BY JOHN BUTLER — The lush and environmentally diverse Beaver Valley is a fitting setting for an interactive in-person community event on Wednesday June 29 at which noted local chef and TV personality Shawn Adler, drawing on his Aboriginal and culinary roots, will talk about foraging and how foraged foods enrich our culinary experience. Foraging is the harvesting of wild edibles, or as Chef Adler describes it, “letting Mother Nature do the planting.”
This free event will be held at the hundred-year-old Kimberley Community Hall, 235309 Grey Rd 13, Kimberley, starting at 7:00 pm on June 29. Everyone is welcome (the building is wheelchair-accessible).
Chef Adler, who owns and operates the Flying Chestnut Kitchen in Eugenia and the Pow Wow Café in Toronto’s Kensington Market, is renowned for using fresh locally sourced foods in his dishes, and for including foraged foods that have been part of Aboriginal culinary practices for centuries.
Adler is Anishinaabe (formerly known as Ojibway) through his mother’s lineage, and it was through gathering edible wild plants with his mother that Adler developed his life-long passion for foraging, an activity he engages in as often as he can with his own children.
For people unfamiliar with Aboriginal cultures, foraged foods may seem like a creative but poor substitute for “mainstream” ingredients. Yet with palates as refined as anybody else’s, Aboriginal cultures across the world have evolved cuisines over millennia that are rich, varied, subtle and satisfying in their own right. Chef Adler will open a window on these cuisines in his Wednesday presentation. He sees his role as partly educational: “People understand what Thai food is, what Italian food is, what Chinese food is, what Ethiopian food is, but people don’t really understand what indigenous cuisine is,” says Adler.
Recently he reached a broader audience by serving as one of the culinary experts on Wall of Chefs, a televised cooking competition aired on the Food Network. Adler was also featured in Forage, a CBC web series that showed people how to forage and to cook foraged foods.
Adler discovered his passion for food creativity in high school and followed this up with a co-op placement and summer job at Hockley Valley Resort, then a two-year stint studying at Stratford Chef School before he opened his first restaurant, Aasmaabik’s Bakery and Bistro, in Peterborough (Aasmaabik is Adler’s Anishinaabe name – it means “The Face of the Rock”).
When the pandemic hit Adler and his food enterprises, he turned the setback into a new kind of service to others by providing his creations – including his signature Three Sisters Stew (corn, beans and squash, three staple crops traditionally grown together) – to non-profit organizations serving seniors, people living on the streets, and other people facing food insecurity. Because of his own family history, Adler is no stranger to hunger. His mother survived her experience as a residential school student by supplementing her meagre school diet through foraging for wild foods near the school.
Adler is quick to point out that foraging is not an excuse to ravage the environment. He observes and espouses three rules to govern foraging: obtain the owner’s permission to forage on private land, harvest sustainably to protect edibles for future generations, and use a knowledgeable guide.
Chef Adler’s presentation is the second of four events in the ecologically-focused Community Connection Speaker Series, sponsored by the Kimberley Community Association, the Grey Highlands Public Library, the Grey Highlands Climate Action Group, the Escarpment Biosphere Conservancy and the Beaver Valley Bruce Trail Club. The third event in the series will focus on food security, and will be held at the Kimberley Community Hall on the evening of July 20. For more information, please visit www.greyhighlandspubliclibrary.com.
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