This was our busiest week yet, we managed to pack in meetings with six contributors! On Monday, March 19, we met again with Gail to understand more about how she started Zero Cocktail Bar and Regent Park Cafe's origins.
Zane, Fatom, and Arden set the scene for shooting Fatom’s Malawah
We also met with Fatom on Monday! She generously agreed to make Malawah for us to photograph. We even got to eat some, which was so delicious! We had a lot of fun taking action shots of Fatom pouring honey over the Malawah; we’re glad we could convince her to do it in the end.
In our March 11 blog post, we wrote about how Deany Peters had shared that Dean Reid, who works at the Community Centre and Community Health Clinic, used to host BBQs pre-revitalization. After speaking on the phone, it seemed he wasn’t going to be able to provide an interview. However, Zane decided to make an impromptu visit to the community centre to see if Dean was available. Thankfully, he was and contributed stories about the “Old Regent'', a place and time where everyone seemed to know everyone else.
Dean didn’t have any photos of the BBQs or that period more broadly. However, after some digging, we found out that a photographer named David Zapporoli had published a book called Regent Park: The Public Experiment in Housing, which features slices of life scenes from the community during the 1990s. We are hoping he’ll allow us to use one of his images in our cookbook to help ensure that the past food culture of the neighbourhood is not forgotten.
Arden pins up our flyers in Daniel’s Spectrum
To heighten engagement across the community, we created posters that link to a Google form through which residents can submit recipes. We’ve put the poster up in Daniels Spectrum, at the Community Centre, and given it to Parliament Library. Ines also graciously agreed to post it on her building’s poster board, and she gave us the contact info for a TCHC employee named Peter. He’s agreed to have TCHC staff put up the poster in the other TCHC buildings, which we hope will attract more contributors to our project.
Unfortunately, we’ve only received one submission through the form so far. It leaves us wondering whether we should have made civic engagement a more central aim of our project, and if so what we would have needed to do to make it more successful. This is something we hope to have a greater opportunity to reflect on once the cookbook is finished and we have time to breathe!
Amanda’s sole cakes! See this image in our final cookbook.
On Wednesday, Arden visited Amanda at the RP Cafe to interview her and take photos of her sole cakes. We learned that food is an artistic outlet for Amanda and she loves cooking as a form of expression. Her mom taught her how to cook in their old apartment in Regent Park when she was really little, and she feels like she took the essence of her mother’s cooking throughout her culinary journey from school to her business, Edible Bliss. Amanda took a video of the interview for her Instagram. If you’d like to watch it, you can view it here.
Zane also met with Mary Ann, a Filipino Regent Parker who’s a pastry chef and lover of all things coconut. It’s only fitting that we’ll be featuring her recipe for coconut buns.
Zane looks on as Fatom takes photos of Veena’s carrot Halva.
During Thursday’s class, we started early and went late. Mishika from the Green Committee project asked her mom, Veena, if she wanted to be included, and Veena said yes! She brought her carrot Halva, a traditional Indian dessert.
Also, we interviewed Nasreen, another vendor at RP Cafe who loves to cook. She made two beautiful platters for us to photograph and will be contributing three recipes (she would have happily given us more).
Now we have most of what we need for the cookbook- recipes, interviews and photos. We just have to edit and assemble it all into something that’s ready to print in around a week's time!
A screenshot of Aditi’s Instagram post of Zane and Arden taking photos of Nasreen’s biryani. Meta!
The Seasoning Stories team members are Fatom, Zane, and Arden