Your body is amazing. It supported a new life for nine months, and then overcame a physical task unlike any other, to give birth to your beautiful baby. Now, your body is producing milk and adjusting to new hormones, sleep deprivation, and new routines. In many cultures, including in Asia, it is expected that during the postpartum period women rest and bond with the baby while her family takes care of all the other daily responsibilities. We’ve researched nourishing foods to support postpartum recovery. You just have to eat them!
This tourtiere recipe originated in Quebec and is frequently enjoyed in the winter months – especially on ski vacations and during special holidays. After enjoying the expansive terrain and fresh Tremblant air, you’ll need a piping hot, hearty pie to warm your bones. So pop off the skis, make some cocoa for the kids, and wrap yourself in cashmere as your Mont Tremblant Tourtiere warms in the oven.
Easiest, funnest (is that a word?) most perfect thing to do with kids in the winter. Sun Peaks Maple Syrup Candy. Kid’s Part: Fill a roasting pan with snow. Use a spoon to carve thin lines/troughs in the fluffy white snow they have collected. Adult’s Part: Place a pot on the stove and pour in your desired amount of pure Canadian Maple Syrup. Never leave the syrup unattended as you bring to a near boil. (It can come to heat very quickly and you never want it to boil over.) Once it is near boiling, have the kids stand back, and gently pour the syrup into the troughs they have made in the snow. Wait one minute while the syrup begins to harden. Using a teaspoon or a popsicle stick, begin at one end of the first trough and roll the candy onto the spoon. Voila! You have a maple syrup candy popsicle. Now for the lesson in teeth brushing..
Your family has escaped the Toronto winter to Blue Mountain and you are getting cozy in a cabin at Ontario’s largest ski and snowboard resort. The fire is blazing, the kids are tired (and happy), and snow falls outside your windows. The Niagara vineyards have kindly provided you with a selection of great wine, and you can now start the quintessential vacation meal: Blue Mountain Cheese Fondue.
You are at a superb ski resort, home for lunch, and really don’t want to stress about dinner. Roast a fab piece of meat and add this incredible Big White Roasted Butternut Squash side dish. You can whip it up between trips to and from the hot tub. Better still? Make double, and turn it into a soup for later in the vacation.
The nutty flavor and grainy texture of quinoa is delicious with the sweet juicy flesh of the squash, a combination popular in Peru, home territory to both of these ingredients. Quinoa was the staple grain food of the Incas of Peru – they call it the mother seed. Modern chemists identify it as being remarkably high in protein – particularly lysine, which is difficult to obtain in other vegetable source. It also supplies fiber, vitamins B and E, calcium, iron, magnesium and phosphorus. This makes a delicious Quinoa and Butternut Squash Baby Food Recipe.
Quinoa and Butternut Squash Baby Food Recipe
1/2cup quinoa
Spring water
1- pound piece butternut squash or other yellow-fleshed squash
- Put the quinoa grains in a small pan with enough spring water to cover by about 2 cm.
- Bring to a boil, reduce and simmer for 15-20 minutes until the dark skins pop open, showing the pale insides.
- Meanwhile peel the squash with a sharp knife, remove the fibers and seeds in the middle and cut up the flesh.
- Stir the cut-up squash into the quinoa, let it bubble up, reduce the heat to a gentle simmer, tightly cover, and cook for 20- 25 minutes, until the grains are tender and translucent and the squash is completely soft.
Makes about 3 cups
Suitable for 9 months and on
Food Adventures – Elisabeth Luard & Frances Boswell
For 9 mos and up
Soup is so full of nutrition and goodness. It’s inexpensive and easy to make, and can be frozen. What more could a Mom want? Here’s a truly Canadian, easy soup recipe.
Aunt Elsie’s “Passatelli” soup
Submitted by Paul Lepri, Quebec
The most common reason mothers probably choose to breastfeed is the knowledge that human milk is the superior infant food. It contains live cells, like those in blood. Some components of human milk also enhance the effects of others, so the ingredients of human milk work together. Here is Why Human Milk is so Special.In contrast, only a small percentage of some ingredients of formula are absorbed; mixing ingredients in formula does not guarantee they will act together the way they do in human milk.
Muriel Swetnam used to bake this unbelievable bread the old-fashioned, Nova Scotian way: using huge recycled coffee cans for the actual baking. She would sell it at church bake sales and I remember one day, she popped over to the house with a few loaves which we devoured in one evening. Eat it warm with real butter. Here’s Muriel’s Famous Brown Bread recipe.
What’s a traditional Canadian Christmas meal? Recipes, like family heirlooms, are often passed down through generations and Ancestry.ca, Canada’s leading family history website, turned to its customers to find out some of Canada’s favourite ancestral concoctions. Here is Mother Dorothy’s Pork Tenderloin.
With hundreds, if not thousands, of customs making up the Canadian cultural identity, what Ancestry.ca discovered was a true mosaic of meals.