On June 29, The Food Connection hosted flavoured herbal vinegar and oil making workshop. This evening was my first Food Connection event. I brought my partner’s mother, Deasy, who is visiting from Indonesia. Right from the beginning we noticed the welcoming Food Connection environment. It’s always a bit intimidating to go to a group where you know no one. Soon after entering the room at Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House, our nerves were put at ease. This warm environment was

What comes to mind when you think of Indonesian cuisine? This is a question many of us pondered heading into last week’s workshop on Indonesian cooking. Thanks to our gracious leaders, Emil and Idris, we can now answer with confidence – and have added staple recipes to our repertoires for extra credibility. Heading into the workshop many of us wondered if Indonesian was similar to Thai cooking? Or Malaysian? Others had exposure through their Dutch heritage and the recipes tha

Slow-cooked comfort food: right on time for the winter rains! Despite the rainy evening we had on Wednesday, some 15 of us showed up at the Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House for another one of the monthly potluck, cooking, and all-things-food-related sessions run by The Food Connection. The theme for this month’s event was slow cookers—very timely, now that the winter seems to have finally decided to show up. The selling point of this workshop? It promised an easy way to pro

This month Jenny hosted a spice-blending workshop, welcoming some new neighbours to the Food Connection table at Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House. Before we even started, Chef Andrew Hunter had a surprise for us. He’d received a donation of Swiss chard, tomatoes, sprouts, radishes, avocado and onions, and we were all invited to take home as much as we could carry -- which turned out to be quite a lot! As always, our tradition of eating dinner together was followed by a hand