This chicken stew is en pointe The life of an RWB dancer is hard, but so is trying to replicate mom’s stew Homemade: Downtown Edition
By: AV Kitching Posted: 7:00 PM CST Monday, Mar. 6, 2023 Last Modified: 1:05 PM CDT Monday, Mar. 20, 2023 Updates

Alanna McAdie dips her spoon into her mother’s chicken stew for a taste as her mother, Margaret, watches, and smiles. It’s a scene that played out often in McAdie’s youth when the duo would cook together at home in Edmonton.

These days cooking with her mother is a special treat; McAdie left home at 15 to pursue her dream of becoming a ballerina. She moved to Winnipeg to live in the residence halls of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School where she boarded with other young dancers.

She graduated from the school’s ballet academic program in 2009, became a company apprentice in 2011, and was promoted to principal dancer in 2021.

Leaving home at such a young age was tricky for the family, Margaret says.

“Letting Alanna go off by herself was a very hard decision. She had wanted to audition for a few years before, but 15 is the age where you are getting to the point where you have to make a decision… it was tough though,” Margaret says.

Battling homesickness was difficult. One of the things McAdie missed the most was her mother’s cooking.

“There was a cafeteria which serves three meals a day and there are snacks and food available throughout most of the day, but it was a difficult transition,” McAdie says.

“I missed my mom’s cooking; I missed the peace and quiet of eating dinner with my family. I missed watching my mom cook and sneaking tastes of her food as she was preparing.”

Cafeteria food played its role, a balanced diet of meat or fish, with vegetables and carbohydrates. Students were taught healthy eating habits and encouraged to eat according to the Canada food guide.

The meals were “perfectly fine but definitely not as good as my mom’s,” she says.

As she grew older, McAdie would attempt to replicate Margaret’s chicken stew with varying degrees of success.

“Mom would make it when she came to visit and then I would try to cook it myself, but it would be just too runny, it wouldn’t come right. Then the next time she would come and show me how to make it again, I would make it and it still wouldn’t be as good as hers.

“She’s so good at it, I don’t know if mine will ever be as good as hers. Hers always tastes better.”

The dish does more than sate her appetite. It reminds her of Margaret’s encouragement, love, and sacrifice.

As a child McAdie had a hectic schedule.

She attended Vimy Ridge Academy in Edmonton, where she would work on her academics in the morning and dance all afternoon, wrapping up at 5:30 p.m. before rushing out to make it in time for a different set of classes, often finishing at 9 or 10 p.m.

Her after-school dance lessons, a thrice-weekly affair, meant the young McAdie had to be driven from one place to the next with no time for dinner.

So Margaret, a pediatric intensive care nurse who worked shifts, would bring a Tupperware container of food for McAdie to eat in the car while on the way to her next class.

There were days when Margaret would be in her uniform, either coming back from a shift or heading to work later that evening.

On those days, the stew would have been left over from a previous meal, portioned out to be frozen and then thawed for the purpose of sustaining the young dancer as she dashed from class to class. At other times, when her mother had days off, it would be freshly prepared.

“Those 15 minutes were my quiet time with my mom. I would get into the front seat of the van and there would be chicken stew with a warm biscuit waiting for me,” McAdie recalls.

“As a kid I never quite understood the amount of planning it would require to have a meal like this ready with a work schedule to balance. I just loved seeing that piping hot meal with the steam swirling up. It’s something I remember eating a lot.”

“As a kid I never quite understood the amount of planning it would require to have a meal like this ready with a work schedule to balance.”–Alanna McAdie

It’s a meal she hopes to make for and with her own children one day, she shares.

McAdie has been dancing for 29 years now and has spent more than half her life at the RWB. This week, she performs in RWB’s production of Swan Lake in the role of Odette/Odile.

As a youngster she tried Highland dance first. Then, when she was seven, ballet captured her imagination.

“I always wanted to be a ballerina. I was pretty obsessed with it,” McAdie says. “I would come home after my ballet classes and practise in the dark so that my parent wouldn’t know I was still dancing.

“I had loved Highland dancing but it was a lot more rigid. There was so much more freedom with ballet. So much more imagination and I gravitated towards that. I feel like ballet has tons of freedom for artistry — yes we do end up trying to perfect particular steps — but I have always felt connected to it,” she explains.

Food is vital for her work, McAdie says and while she doesn’t eat a big meal before a show, choosing instead to have a rich smoothie packed with fruits and vegetables a couple of hours before she dances, she very much enjoys sitting down to dinner afterward.

McAdie doesn’t mince her words when it comes to addressing assumptions people may have about the way ballet dancers maintain their physiques.

“To do this job I have to eat. I eat all foods, I try to be very straightforward in sharing that. ‘Healthy v unhealthy’ and terms such as ‘clean-eating’ are things I try to avoid.

“I have also found food fads and diet trends to not fuel my body enough for the amount of physical fitness required at my job. Every dancer is very different in what they need but for me the more I enjoy my meals the better.”

She’s as candid when shattering myths about the glamourous life of a dancer.

“I think there are elements where we get to experience a bit of glamour but 90 per cent of the time we live in sweatpants at work. We are sweaty, our feet are blistered and (we) travel a lot from show to show. I understand why it may seem glamourous, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way,” she says.

If it sounds like tough work, it certainly is.

McAdie dances daily, even more so when preparing for a show, and the demand on her body can sometimes seem extreme, she shares.

“It is a sacrifice and it’s something I’ve accepted as part of what I do but there are times when it can feel like it’s too hard on the body and the brain,” she says.

“It is a sacrifice and it’s something I’ve accepted as part of what I do but there are times when it can feel like it’s too hard on the body and the brain.”–Alanna McAdie

Maintaining the spirit that made her a dancer as a child has kept her going through difficult periods.

“There is a certain amount of sass and determination that I have always had. I’ve never really been afraid to do things my own way. In times where I get lost I remind myself to just start exploring as if I was still practicing my port de bras in the dark in my childhood bedroom.“

av.kitching@freepress.mb.ca

Margaret’s Chicken Stew

8 skinless-boneless chicken thighs, or five chicken breasts, or one small chicken, stripped
Olive oil
1 onion
2 cloves of garlic
2-3 stalks of celery
3 tbsp butter
1/4 cup flour
2 cups of chicken stock
2 large russet potatoes, cubed
4 large carrots, cut to the same size as the potatoes
1 tsp of marjoram, tarragon, rosemary and thyme
Salt and pepper
1 cup of green peas
Handful of parsley
4 large mushrooms

Clean the chicken, then chop into cubes and cook in a medium frying pan on medium high heat.

Add salt and pepper to taste.

Once cooked set aside in a bowl.

Dice your onion, garlic and celery and cook on medium high with 2 tablespoons of butter for about five minutes in a heavy-bottomed pot

For the roux, add 1 tablespoon of butter plus ¼ cup of flour to the onion mixture. Once the flour has absorbed the butter, start to add the chicken stock. Thicken the stock to a creamy consistency and when it’s almost at a boil add your potatoes, carrots and spices.

Once the sauce has come to a boil, reduce to low heat, add the cooked chicken and simmer for 30-40 minutes.

Add peas, chopped parsley and mushrooms and cook for an additional five minutes.

*** When there is about 20 minutes remaining on the stew cooking time, begin your tea biscuits.

Tea Biscuits

Makes approximately 12 biscuits

2 cups flour
4 tsp of baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup of butter
1 cup of milk

Mix flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium-sized bowl

Cut the butter into the flour mixture with a fork or pastry cutter until mix resembles sand.

Make a well in the centre, add milk and stir together until it pulls away from the sides.

Turn onto a floured surface, knead a few times and roll out dough to a circle about two inches thick.

Use medium-sized biscuit cutter to cut biscuits, then place in muffin tin. Bake at 450 F for 12-15 minutes.

AV Kitching
Reporter

AV Kitching is an arts and life writer at the Free Press.

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