Community Gardens cooking up something new

By Stephen Dafoe

Morinville – A $2,000 gift from the Morinville Centennial Celebrations Committee is launching another local group on the road to helping people with healthy and homemade eating. The Morinville Community Gardens recently received a cheque from the committee to continue a project they had initiated during the centennial year, a cookbook of local recipes.

Morinville Community Gardens spokesperson Valerie Loseth said the Centennial Celebrations Committee had collected the recipes and thought her group was the one to continue the project. “They thought that because we are into sustainable living and growing back to our roots, all those sorts of things, perhaps that might be something we’d be interested in,” Loseth said, adding the project will now be used as a fundraiser for the Community Gardens.

When the Centennial Celebrations Committee passed the torch to the garden group, they passed along 60 recipes ready to go. Loseth said she wants to add more recipes from the community as well as from local producers, the latter exchanged for information on where cookbook readers can buy locally produced ingredients. “If we have a recipe for Saskatoon pie, here’s where you can get the Saskatoon [berries] locally,” she said. “It’s really what we are all excited about.”

The Community Gardens group are hoping to have the cookbook completed and published in time for the Morinville Farmers’ Market in June. They are planning to set up shop a couple time a month at the market and sell the book for $10 per copy.

Loseth said proceeds from cookbook sales will go towards funding educational programs the garden group is kicking off this year, including cooking classes at the cultural centre on how to make pickles or jams, sustainable skills Loseth and her group feel have been lost over the years but which seem to be undergoing a resurgence of interest. “I think there is interest in the whole sustainable living thing, in going green and getting back to the simple but basic ways of life,” she said. “I see it all the time and I think we can capitalize on that.”

Recipes sought

The group is currently seeking additional recipes from residents for their cookbook project. “We would like recipes that are very simple [and] basic but form scratch,” Loseth said. “We don’t want to know how to doctor up Kraft Dinner; we want to know how you would make your own pasta noodles or how you would make bread and biscuits from scratch, things like that.”

But the cookbook will not be exclusively food recipes. The Community Gardens group are looking for instructions on making your own shampoo, soap and detergents.

Recipes can be sent to gardeninfo@morinvillecommunitygardens.com.

The Morinville Community Gardens group has 23 members currently and will be holding their monthly meetings on the second Tuesday of the month at the Morinville Community Library beginning in March. Loseth said the group is getting ready for the spring gardening season and have plots available at both Community Gardens locations.

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2 Comments

  1. We have had such wonderful support from the community, we are excited to see and hear the response on this endeavour. One correction to note is that our monthly meetings will begin in March not February. I had given the editor wrong information, my apologies.

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