Food & Drink by Shari McIntyre (formerly Darling) For more information on wine and food, go to www.sharidarling.com and a list of autoimmune diseases. Dates are also a good source of various vitamins, minerals and fibre and contain calcium, iron, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium and zinc. (To make date paste, in the bowl of a large food processor fitted with an “S” blade or in a blender, combine two cups of pitted dates and ½ cup of water. Process until very smooth, scraping down the bowl to make sure that all of the dates are incorporated. Use as required for recipe.) This cranberry sauce is far more savoury than the canned version. The sauce finds balance in its tanginess (from the fresh cranberries), gentle rather than cloying sweetness (from the date paste), bitterness (from the pine needles or bitters), saltiness (from the added salt), crunch (from the pecans), and spiciness (from the pumpkin spices). Adding toasted pecans brings some toasty flavour and added crunch to the sauce. If you like sweeter versions, include raisins. If you are hesitant about using pine needle tea, add bitters (from an alcohol store such as the LCBO) instead. Bitters (instead of pine needle tea) add that bitter taste sensation, making the sauce rounder and more complex in its taste sensations. As a status Métis, I enjoy researching the history, culture and foods of our Canadian Métis Indigenous people. I am French Métis on my mother’s side and spent years tracing her family roots and routes from Penetanguishene, Ontario back to Lac des Deux Montagnes (Lake of Two Mountains) Quebec, then as far back to the Loire Valley, France in the 1400s. I love using original Métis recipes today, sometimes switching things up a little. Our Métis people made cranberry sauce. Cranberry sauce is a lovely condiment to serve throughout the winter and as a condiment for turkey. Cranberry sauce makes scrumptious jam, poultry glaze, rib barbecue sauce inmuffins, and as a sauce for meatballs. I was delighted to find a Métis cranberry sauce recipe. Pine needle tea is prepared to boil the fresh cranberries. Our First Nation and Métis people often used pine and spruce needles in various ways, such as a steam vapour to act as an expectorant (thins mucus secretions), and as a decongestant for chest and sinus colds. Our Indigenous peoples also sipped pine needle tea. According to a few articles I read, pine needle tea may contain four to five times the vitamin C of fresh-squeezed orange juice. This tea is also high in vitamin A. (Pine needle tea is easy to make. Just chop about 1 cup of pine needles finely. Add them to three cups of boiling water in the saucepan. Let it steep for about an hour. Do not boil the needles with water, as this will release the needles' terpenes and make the tea taste too bitter. Filter the tea through a coffee filter.) Simmer your fresh cranberries with the pine needle tea and other ingredients. The resulting sauce celebrates the taste sensations of sourness, saltiness and bitterness. In today’s recipes, cranberry sauce requires sugar. The Métis diet incorporated sugar. The European fur traders included sugar as part of the treaty negotiation rations. The origins of maple syrup are connected to Indigenous people as well. You can use either sugar or maple syrup to sweeten your Métis cranberry sauce. I don’t eat sugars very often, if at all. Instead, I make a healthier and, in my opinion, a tastier version using date paste. Date paste adds more of a brown sugar taste to dishes and desserts. Did you know that dates are higher in polyphenols than any of the most commonly consumed fruits and vegetables? Polyphenols neutralize free radicals, helping to reduce the damage caused by inflammation. Inflammation is directly associated with heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, Alzheimer’s 54 | www.snowbirds.org
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