Good Food and the Good Food Box

Today, we are pleased to welcome our guest contributor, Ana.  Ana is a volunteer at Newcomer Women’s Services Toronto. She recently moved to Toronto from El Salvador.

Indeed!  The Good Food Box is a great way to try new vegetables and fruits we might not dare to try on our own.  It is no more expensive than a trip to the supermarket and it is easy to get connected with a Good Food Box centre in your community.

Now that we’re on the subject of food, I read an article recently on how migrating to Canada can mean a deterioration in our health, mainly in our diets.  I understood the point of view of newcomer children, who naturally want to belong, to identify with their new home.  I came to Canada when I was ten years old, and I still remember how conflicting it can be to want a sense of belonging but also keeping up with family and cultural traditions.  At the same time though, I think it is so important to cherish our identity, our food traditions as they frankly tend to be healthier than most fast food in North America.

Also, while food can be something that separates, it can also be something that unites people of all parts of the world.  For example, there are many foods we have in common with societies on the other end of the world.  We may prepare and eat them differently but they are basically the same.  I remember feeling excited when I learned that my elementary school buddy who was from Trinidad and Tobago loved tamarind candies as much as I did!

One of the perks of living in Toronto is being able to have access to ingredients from around the world and seeing how even the most particular food item can be found and enjoyed in a wide variety of cultural groups.  The Newcomer Women’s Networking program can be a great space to showcase the similarities in our food traditions and a great space to learn different preparations for ingredients we are used to using.

With that in mind, I would like to share my favourite way of eating a mango.  The mango can be green (sour) or nice and ripe for this recipe.  This is far from a strict recipe, I am just giving you a rough idea of the proportions, as it really is to taste.

Salvadoran Style Mango Treat

• 1 mango (if ripe) or about 5 small green mangos, sliced
• Salt to taste
• Hot sauce (optional)
• Pumpkin seeds (ground to a fine powder)
• 1 lime

Cut up the mango(s), add salt, lime and hot sauce to taste. Sprinkle with the ground up pumpkin seeds and serve!

I hope you enjoy as much as I do!

Women, Acting and Food – Today’s NWN Saturday program

So, keeping this blog up to date is proving to be a little more challenging than I anticipated.  It’s certainly not because we haven’t been doing things.  We’ve been doing so many things that it’s hard to find time to write about the things we’ve been doing.  But, we’re going to try to get back on the wagon with the blog, so here’s an update on what we did today.

Every Saturday, we run a Newcomer Women’s Networking program.  It’s an opportunity for newcomer women to get together, socialize, try out new things and find out about services, opportunities and other things that could come in handy.

Today, we had two special guests, Tabby Johnson and Mariya Misheva.

Tabby Johnson is a very talented actress, singer and educator.  She will be running 6 weeks of acting workshops with us.  Today, we did some warm up exercises to loosen our acting muscles and we started talking about the story of a Canadian pioneer lady from the 1600′s.  I think we’re going to try to act out her story.

Tabby is tons of fun and she says all sorts of beautiful gems of wisdom.  I wish I had a pen and paper with me to write them down.  But one that I remember was about laughter.  She told us that in difficult situations, it’s always good to try to add a little bit of laughter.  Because, “if there’s no laughter, there’s no hope.  And if there’s no hope, there’s no reason.”  That’s deep.

Mariya is a former student from our LINC class from several years back.  She now works at Dixon Hall.  She came to tell us about the Good Food Box program, run by FoodShare.  It’s a program that allows people to buy fresh fruits and vegetables for very reasonable prices.  People can buy boxes which contain a mix of different fruits and vegetables depending on the season.  The boxes come in two different sizes and you can choose organic or non-organic produce (they have different prices) or a fruit only box.  There’s even a box with cut-up fruits or vegetables for people who might face challenges preparing their food.

Mariya also brought for us an amazing salad that she made using the produce from the Good Food Box.  It was delicious!  It had beets, potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes and home made mayonaise and other things I’m sure that I can’t remember.   She’s going to come back next week with the recipe and a couple of Good Food boxes so we can have a better idea of what you get with the program.

Thank you to Tabby and Mariya for coming and kudos to the more than 20 lovely ladies who braved the snow storm this morning.  I had a great time and I’m looking forward to next week!

Happy New Year!

We’re looking forward to this new year at Newcomer Women’s Services.  We’ve got lots of new and exciting things planned for this new year.  One of them is this blog!  (actually, the blog was set up last summer by our awesome summer students Habiba and Aisha — and now that we’ve figured out how to sign in, keeping it updated is one of our 2011 new year’s resolutions).  We’ll let you know about our other new and exciting projects in the coming weeks.  So stay tuned for details!

In the mean time, we wish you all the best for 2011!

Happy New Year!

Feliz Ano Nuevo!

Selamat Tahun Baru!

Bonne Annee!

Sorry it’s not all spelled accurately, we’ll add those fancy letters and accents as soon as we figure out how to do that!