Negotiating Peace One Bite At A Time

I read an article called Negotiating Peace One Bite At a Time on the NATO website and it talked about a study done by professors at Cornell University and the University of Chicago that shows sharing a meal can make people more cooperative and less competitive with each other. Sharing food encourages mutual understanding and empathy.  

When politicians are in the midst of negotiations over a tricky matter sharing a meal together can sometimes lead to a quicker and more equitable resolution.

Photo from The Guardian

We know for example that President Richard Nixon was able to end twenty-five years of no communication or diplomatic ties between the United States and China. Was that because during his seven-day official visit to three Chinese cities he shared food with both the Chinese premier and the leader of the Chinese communist party?   

In his article called Dining for Detente writer Joseph Temple says Nixon and his team received repeated briefings about meals with the Chinese. They practiced eating birds nest soup and Peking Duck so they would be able to remark in a complimentary fashion on their taste and aroma. Nixon and his wife rehearsed eating with chopsticks for months so they could use them properly at their dinners in China.

Former American President Barack Obama frequently negotiated with other political leaders over food.

Photo from The Guardian

Here he is having beer and pretzels with Angela Merkel the German Chancellor.

Photo from AFP News

Chowing down burgers with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev .

Photo by Adam Scotti from the Prime Minister’s Office

And hanging out in a restaurant called Liverpool House in Montreal with Justin Trudeau.

The practice of political figures negotiating with their international counterparts over food happens in Britain too.

Photo from Wikipedia

Here is American President Reagan breakfasting at 10 Downing Street with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1982.

Image from Buckingham Palace

I wonder if Queen Elizabeth requested any political advice from Paddington Bear when they had tea together in 2022?

Other posts……….

10 Photographs About Tea

Eating Around the World

In Obama’s Spot Again

10 Photographs About Tea

Life is like a cup of tea. It’s all in how you make it. – Old Irish Proverb

My Mom having a tea party with her sisters in the late 1920s.

Rooster Town Kettle by Ian August is a piece of public art marking the site of Rooster Town a close-knit community of Metis in Winnipeg from 1901-1961. The artist said it is in recognition of the way sharing tea was an important way of socializing in Rooster Town. I photographed it on a bike ride in 2020.

Having an elegant tea party with three of my friends in 2016.

I photographed this artwork by Linda Syddick in the Sydney Museum in Australia. It is called The Magi Offering Billy Tea As A Gift to Mary and Joseph.

At a tea ceremony with my Mom in Hong Kong when my parents visited us there in 2004.

Halcyon Teapot by Michael Sherrill. I photographed it when I visited an art exhibit of unique tea pots at the University of Arizona in 2020.

My sister and I having a tea party in my grandparents’ backyard in Drake Saskatchewan in the 1950s.

Afternoon Tea or The Gossips by John Everett Millais was one of my favourite art pieces at the Winnipeg Art Gallery when I worked there as a guide from 2012-2023.

Having lunch at the Jasmine Tea Room in Altona with the women I volunteer with at the MCC Thrift Store on Selkirk Avenue.

Boa-Tea by artist Michael Massie. I photographed it at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 2018.

Other posts ……….

Is It Really A Tea Pot?

Building a Tipi For Storytelling

English Tea with the T-4s

Paska From Agnes

A loaf of paska from the Mennonite Girls Can Cook website

Paska is a special kind of bread, on the sweeter side, usually served with icing. It is an Easter tradition Mennonites picked up during their sojourn in Ukraine.

When I was growing up our family received paska each Easter from my mother’s friend Agnes. She always made us a loaf of paska bread and six paska buns all beautifully iced and decorated, one for each member of our family.

Our rented house on Kroeker Avenue.

In the 1960s our second home in Steinbach was a rented house on Kroeker Avenue. Mrs. Agnes Gerbrandt lived just two doors down. She and my mother became friends.

Mom was raising four children but Mrs. Gerbrandt was raising ten and she was a widow. My parents tried to help her out in a variety of ways and she never forgot that.

Agnes and my Mom at my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary

When we moved after two years Mom and Agnes remained friends and Agnes started bringing us her delicious paska every Easter.

Many years later when my Mom was ill and hospitalized for extended periods Agnes was one of her most faithful visitors.

Both my Mom and Agnes have passed away but this morning when I am attending the paska breakfast at my church I will be thinking about both of them.

Other posts………

Images of Easter

Easter A Time of New Beginnings

Easter Inspiration at the Assiniboine Park Conservatory

The Winnipeg Woman Who Invented Red River Cereal

Did you know a woman from Winnipeg invented Red River cereal?

Photo by Denzil Green

Red River cereal, a mixture of flax seeds, cracked wheat and rye, was a staple in my home growing up. My father loved it and it was a regular breakfast offering at our house. We ate it hot with milk and brown sugar.

I wanted to mention the cereal in a book I’m writing set in the 1930s so I started doing some research.

I discovered an interesting series of blog posts by Ruth Zaryski Jackson about her husband’s aunt Gertrude Edna Skilling who was the inventor of Red River Cereal.

Gertrude, affectionately known as Gert, was born in 1887 in Teeswater Ontario. Her Dad John was a music teacher who sold musical instruments and sewing machines. Her Mom Agnes was a homemaker who had ten children.

Photo of Gertrude Skilling by S.Askin from a memoir by Agnes Norma Skilling Jackson

Gert became a teacher and accepted a job in Calgary where she met and married Harvey Kavaner in 1915. They had three children. The couple moved to Winnipeg in 1920 when Harvey became the President of the Red River Grain Company and a member of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange.

It was in Winnipeg in 1924 that Gert began experimenting in her kitchen grinding and mixing various amounts of rye, flax and wheat to create a new cereal.

In 1926 Gert and her family members handed out free samples of the new cereal with cream in the Food Building at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto.

Gertrude Skilling Kavaner -photo by Arthur Studio Detroit Michigan from a memoir by Agnes Norma Skilling Jackson

The cereal was patented in 1929 by Gert’s husband Harvey. It was named after the Red River Valley in Manitoba. Unfortunately Gertrude’s name did not appear on the patent so she was never given credit for inventing the cereal.

Gert and Harvey had a lovely home at 901 Wellington Crescent in Winnipeg. Unfortunately due to the stock market crash and the ensuing financial repercussions they had to sell it and moved to 1095 Wolseley Avenue.

You can learn more about Gertrude in this blog post by her sister Agnes and more about Gertrude’s husband Harvey in this historical entry by Gordon Goldsborough. Gertrude died in 1946.

Red River cereal has been manufactured by a variety of companies over the years Maple Leaf, Robin Hood and Smuckers. In 2020, Smucker Foods decided to stop distributing the cereal in Canada and in 2021 ceased production of it entirely.

Photo of Red River Cereal from the Arva Flour Mills website

Happily in 2022 Arva Flour Mills based in Ontario acquired the brand from Smucker Foods and began to manufacture and distribute it in stores again. Arva says it has become a very successful seller for them and they have been hard pressed to keep up with the demand for the cereal.

Red River Cereal was a part of my childhood experience but I haven’t had any in a long time.

I looked online and it is available at many Winnipeg grocers including quite appropriately the Red River Valley Co-op on Grant Avenue.

Perhaps it’s time to try Red River Cereal again.

Other posts…………

The Matilda Effect

Eating Like A Mennonite

Eating Around the World

A Lid For Every Pot

I am loathe to admit this but for quite a few years now our three cooking pots have been lidless. I am not sure what happened to the lids but they either broke or were lost and we just never got around to replacing them.

Why not? I can’t say. It wasn’t a priority somehow. We just made do.

If we were cooking something and a pot needed to be covered we’d put a pizza pan on top of the pot.

Once when my brother and his partner stayed in our condo while we were away on a trip they gave us this colorful rubber lid perhaps as a gentle hint that we needed to do something about our lidless pot situation.

The rubber lid was helpful but the only problem was that if you didn’t lift it in just the right way it was easy to burn your fingers on the steam from the pot. I’ve done that several times and did it again last week.

My shrieks of pain from the burn were the final straw for my husband Dave!

He said he was going out to buy us a new set of pots.

I photographed the Thrift Shop extra lid bin yesterday when I volunteered

That’s when I remembered that in the room at the Selkirk Avenue MCC Thrift Store where I volunteer each week unpacking and pricing items, there is a bin with abandoned pot lids. As we empty boxes of donated stuff we sometimes find lids with no matching pot and throw them into the bin.

I’m not sure why I hadn’t thought of it before that lids which matched our pots might be in that bin and just sitting there waiting for us.

My husband Dave took action immediately grabbing our pots and driving to the Thrift Shop where he did indeed find a snug-fitting lid for each of our pots.

So now our pots have lids!

As the old idiom says………… there is a lid for every pot.

Other posts………..

Going to Pot

Is It Really a Tea Pot?

Thanks, Harriet and Shannon

First Par With First Visitors

We’ve already been golfing three times since we arrived in Arizona. There’s a nice little course nearby with great twilight rates. We’ve been golfing with our friends Tom and Sylvia who are the first guests we have welcomed to our rented home.

I wondered how my golf game would be since I don’t play very often, but I haven’t been doing too badly and today I got my first par after sinking a nice long putt on the eighth green so I was pretty happy about that. Tom and Sylvia are setting the bar pretty high as far as being guests goes since Tom is a professional cook and has been making all these amazing meals for us.  Last night it was pork and rice, panfried shrimp and Chinese vegetables. The night before it was steak and lobster. Looking forward to seeing what will be on the menu tonight.  

Other posts……..

I Golf For the Scenery

The Waste Management Golf Tournament

Dinner in Arizona With Uncle Herb

Food Links

What food is associated with different people in your life?  Bon Appetempt A Coming of Age Story by Amelia Morris is a memoir/food book I read not long ago. Each chapter of Amelia’s life and the important people in it are somehow linked to certain foods. Morris’ book got me thinking about what foods might have connections with my family members. 

My Grandma and Grandpa Peters

My one grandma made wonderful chicken noodle soup. She prepared everything from scratch. Caught, killed and cooked the chicken, cut the noodles from dough she made, added her own special spices to the broth.  I remember she brought me a jar of her chicken noodle soup when she came to visit me after I had given birth to her first  great- grandson. My younger son was so enamored with his great grandmother’s soup when he was six he wrote and illustrated a story about how she made her soup.

My mother-in-law and father-in-law

My husband’s mother made the best beef roasts I’ve ever tasted. She also baked excellent zwiebach (a Mennonite bun that is really two buns in one) and her grandchildren loved her homemade donuts.  My older son once wrote a book in school about all the things he loved in the world and on the last page he wrote “but most of all I love my Oma’s homemade donuts.” 

Dave making tortillas in our home on the Hopi Indian Reservation in 1990

My husband Dave is very talented in the kitchen.  He makes a great Pad Thai,  a good taco casserole and is famous for his chili.

My son has made us many wonderful meals but he is an especially gifted barbeque chef. Whether he’s grilling salmon, steaks or farmer’s sausage the results are sure to be delicious.

My Mom baking bread with my school class

My mother was an excellent cook. Every year she would come to my school class to bake bread with my students and in December she came and helped them each make a bag full of peffernussen ( a German Christmas cookie) to take home to their families. Mom also baked and decorated beautiful birthday cakes, made delicious buns and great chocolate chip and white cookies with raisins inside. 

I could go on and on because I have so many friends and family members that are excellent cooks. Many important times in my life are associated with meals and the memorable people who prepared them and shared them with me. 

Other posts…….

What Presentation

A Memorable Meal

Bronuts

Bronuts

We’d seen the article in the newspaper about the new bakery in our neighborhood where two brothers were making donuts so delicious that on their first day of business they sold out their inventory in 90 minutes!

So on Saturday we decided to give Bronuts a try.  The place was full and bustling but we didn’t have to wait in line. 

There were six kinds of donuts for sale and we decided to try the lemon poppy seed, strawberry and peanut butter chocolate. 

They were all delicious- light and fluffy with creamy icing.  The lemon poppy seed was my favourite. The decor at Bronuts is clean and minimilist the only real decoration these artistic renderings of the donut ingredients painted on the wall. We bought the donuts right after going out for breakfast so we shared one and then took the rest home to eat later with evening guests. Our bronuts were great! We will be going back for more. 

Other posts…………

From the Land

Fools and Horses

Tacos The Real Meal Deal

Where Are the Recipes?

Recently one of my blog readers joked with me about the lack of cooking posts on What Next?  Back on March 27th I said that I’d be posting a new recipe Id tried every week in an attempt to  improve my culinary skills.  I haven’t been keeping that committment. It’s not that I’m not cooking. I am. Sometimes. But I’ve tended to make tried and true dishes or been in such a hurry that I haven’t taken photographs or documented my cooking process. 

But just to let you know…… I made two meals for guests last weekend and here’s the proof.  First meal was for friends Gerry and Maureen and Paul and Wendi. 

Cucumber, kale, pomegranate, honeyed almond, feta, avocado salad with balsamic dressing.

Pork loin roast done in the slow cooker with a brown sugar glaze served with a hot cinnamon,  and nutmeg flavoured fruit compote.

Roasted cauliflower in a hot sauce, blue cheese dressing

Baby potatoes in garlic butter and parsley

I didn’t make dessert because my friend Wendi brought delicious mini carrot cake and cream cheese cupcakes.

Second meal was gourmet tacos for my Dad and my sister and her husband.Here’s my kitchen counter ready for taco making. 

I won’t make any more promises about the regularity of my cooking posts.  My last one was in May.  But I’ll still try to keep you posted on my cooking progress when I can. My friend Meena and her sister Beena made us delicious butter chicken when they were visiting in June and she’s left me with the ingredients to try that on my own. So that just might be my next post. 

Other food posts……..

Lemon Meringue Dessert

Weighty Matters

Chocogasm

Eating Sticky Rice in Laos