The Prairie Cookbook

This book originally started out as a collection of Ukrainian recipes I grew up with.  But as I started to collect recipes from family members, I realized the food I grew up with was really a fusion (yes way before it was a hip gastro term) of Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, German and British food.  Essentially Canadian Prairie Food as I now call it!

 

The Prairies you say?  Where is that?  It is a region in western Canada covering three provinces: Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.  The easiest description is north of North Dakota and Montana in the US. It has some of the harshest weather conditions in the country and some of the warmest people you will ever encounter.

 

The passing of my grandfather last fall made me realize that an entire way of life was disappearing from this region.  A way of life I doubt many of us could survive these days.  And soon we will have nothing but photos and stories to remember it by.

 

And recipes!  Recipes that have been handed down through generations and varied over the years to account for Prairie climates and ingredients.  Recipes you will not find anywhere else in the world.  I only wish I had started sooner so that we would have some of my great grandmother’s (“baba”) and my Grandma Schwab’s amazing recipes.

 

This book and its collection of memories and food, is dedicated to my grandfather, the nicest man I have ever known.  I hope we got his favorite recipes right.

 

я тебе люблю Дідусь

 

Lisa