Comfort foods Cookbook features recipes, stories from people raised in the foster system By: Eva Wasney Posted: 6:13 PM CST Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2023 Last Modified: 10:05 AM CST Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2023 Updates

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Chili got Christina McKay through university. The hearty, affordable stew, made in big batches, was one of the first recipes she mastered as a young person on a tight student budget.

“I lived off of it for the better part of a year,” she says with a laugh.

McKay, 34, was born in Brandon and apprehended into the foster care system at just three days old. She was made a permanent ward of the Crown at 12 years old and aged out of care in her early 20s.

Her chili recipe is one of nine dishes included in A Safe Plate: Recipes and Stories of Young People from Child Welfare, a digital cookbook published recently by the Children’s Aid Foundation of Canada.

The book is a way for the foundation to share first-person stories about the foster system over the common language of food.

“Food is a connector to our histories, our personal lives,” says foundation president and chief executive officer Valerie McMurtry. “We loved the idea of sharing food as a conduit for storytelling.”

It’s also an opportunity to highlight some of the nutritional challenges faced by youth in foster care across the country.

“Any of the young people involved (in the cookbook) will tell you how hard it is when you age out of government care. Most of our young people who have come from care are living below the poverty line, so having access to fresh and healthy food that’s affordable is really hard,” McMurtry says.

“We (also know) how hard it is for youth in care to learn how to cook, to know their own histories and their preferences with food.”

For McKay, food and cooking have always been a source of comfort.

“I spent a lot of my life feeling like I didn’t belong. Food was a calming and stabilizing force. No matter where I was, I could always bake or cook and give myself that sense of home, and as I got older it became this connective force for me,” she says.

Some of her earliest memories involve baking cookies and making perogies with her mom and brothers.

“Those are some of the more special memories I have with my mom because I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with her,” McKay says.

As a teenager living in a foster home, baking was a way to feed her sweet tooth and her interest. She also took on the task of making lunches for the other kids living in the home, an effort that was supported by her foster dad.

Chili became a speciality during her first year as a fine arts student at the University of Manitoba. She was getting sick of eating eggs and oatmeal almost exclusively, so she called her foster mom for advice.

“She actually walked me through the steps of making it over the phone and then explained how you can use the base, change the spices and make a couple of things out of it, like spaghetti sauce. It was a really versatile thing to learn,” ” McKay says.

“It was one of the more positive memories I have between me and her.”

These days, chili is something she makes when winter hits. She can make the dish with her eyes closed and often substitutes ingredients based on what’s in the fridge — sweet potatoes and cauliflower are a recommended addition.

McKay still bakes and is busy preparing batches of gingerbread cookies for upcoming holiday work parties. She’s now a student support case worker with Futures Forward, a local organization working to reduce financial and educational barriers for young people aging out of Child and Family Services. It’s been a rewarding way to give back.

“Doing what I’m doing is incredibly meaningful to me. I’m really happy to be an advocate for youth in care because I feel like our voices aren’t valued in the same way that they would be if you were in a normal family structure,” she says.

That reality is one of the reasons the Safe Plate cookbook project appealed to her.

“It invites people to see youth in care not as a label, but as the people they are,” McKay says. “I hope (my chili recipe) gives people a full belly and it offers up an opportunity to connect with someone at your table.”

A Safe Plate is available to download free from the Children’s Aid Foundation website. For every download, the KARE Foundation will donate $5 to support the organization’s national youth and family programming, to a maximum of $50,000.

eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @evawasney