Rohit, Bhutan

“‘Chowmein,’ which is also called Hakka noodles in Edmonton. Available in Edmonton in most restaurants.”

Zahra, Kurdistan

“‘Kebba’ with soup and salad
This dish melts in your mouth. We would eat this almost every week back home but now twice a month. It is the meal we have when a family member visits, or a family gathering. This is my favourite food that I make whenever I have the time to make it, because everyone will love it.”

Shant, Bhutan

“Chicken and rice, doesn’t matter what the ingredients are, just chicken and rice.”

Zahra, Kurdistan

“‘Tafete’
There are a lot more delicious foods, but I wanted to make it different because this food reminds me of village and being at my grandparent’s house. Especially a mother will be cooking outside on a normal stove, collect wood and cook on a very big pot for all of us, especially if my aunts and uncles came to the same house and all gather, this would be a side dish but traditional. We all gather to have this all together. It gives the warmness and love of family, and the hope and reminds me of how we all gathered and spent time together and love and everything but we didn’t realize we wouldn’t have this time forever, we all have now split up everywhere. It’s the food that once brought everyone together.

Soup: meat, chicken, peas, eggplant, grains, carrot, especially depending on the home itself, depends on what my grandmother planted; the eggplant, the chickpeas all grew themselves and the meat and the chicken were from the home themselves.”

Kancha, Bhutan

“Nettle plant cooked with water or milk and it’s made a thick paste and millet used – when people had no bread or rice, this is what they survived with”

Bhutanese Spices can be purchased at:

• Spice Center
• All Indian /Real Canadian Superstore
• Walmart

Tek and Krishna, Bhutan

“Momo-masala has to be imported, a boxed masala, so we need to go to Lethbridge, or back to Nepal, or our friends can help import/bring this for us.”

Shiva, Bhutan

“Sel Roti
Prepared and eaten during weddings, celebrations- anyone in Nepal will know this food. At special functions, this is surrounded by rice pudding on platters.”

Tek, Bhutan

“Sel Roti
All the people of our country know this food; this food reminds me of my childhood and my country, every time I eat this I remember my friends and family.”

Sarah, Sierra Leone

“My dish is rice and potato leaves. I like it because it reminds me of back home, and you can have it with meat and fish. You can eat it any time.”

Santosh, Bhutan

“When pork curry is made at home I can finish three or four plates of it with rice!”

Delvin, Kurdistan

“Mulukhiyah:
I like it when we prepare it together to eat it. We make it in big families, the plant is very long and we pick the leaves together, and wait until it is dry to add it to the food; we wash and squish to make sure water is drained, and oil and garlic and burn it. It’s good to smell it, when water reduces, we then put salt and kisbera and finally add water a little on leaf. We use garlic, other spices (like coriander), oil.”

D6, Sierra Leone

“I drew a bowl of rice and cassava leaf, with chicken, meat, and fish. This reminds me of anytime my Gramma cooks for me when I come back home from playing soccer, or come back from a game.”

Mariama, Sierra Leone

“I have Cassava leaf with rice. It has smoked fish and meat in it. It’s very spicy. It’s one of our staple foods, so we eat this every single day and it’s spicy. It reminds me of back home.”

Sharifa, Kurdistan

“Zucchini and eggplant with rice in it; with rice there are many spices and tomato paste, sometimes chilli in the rice. Sometimes they put rice inside chillies, sometimes they cook it together in the same pot. They also add beef or chicken inside.

They cook all the time, because it is a favourite food, but for family gatherings they also cook this food. It reminds me of going back to my family after marriage, when my Mom cooks this for me, it reminds me of my mother’s love for me and I love my mother’s food, so I make it now, every week!”

Shadan, Iraq

“We always made dolma, and we have special leaves for it. I was surprised because I couldn’t use the same leaves as back home. I used to use grape leaves. But I found out lately that the leaves here are possible. There’s all sorts of stuff we find here. For sure back home is more tastier because they don’t use chemical, but we are happy with it.”

Rabin, Bhutan

“Typical type of food made by Rai peoples; they would get feathers and wings and legs of chicken and cut in very small pieces. After mixing with spices, they burn the feathers and then cook… Called the ‘father of modern Biryani’.”

Niyat, Eritrea

“It’s orange, and it tastes really good. There is a flour of Shiro. First you have to put onions, a little bit of berbere, a little bit of sauce, and then you gotta put the flour in, and some water, and just mix it.”

Sharifa, Kurdistan

“Rovi – another favourite food. I don’t know how to cook it, but it reminds me of my mother. I ate this food with my Mom.”

Elena, Kurdistan

“First time I had it, it changed my life.”

Hileen, Kurdistan

“Rovi (in Kurdish) is Sheep intestines, stomach and skin. It has a lot of flavour, a lot of spices you fill it in with rice. For stomach you fill with rice and sew with needle and thread. When you eat it, you pull the thread, it’ll open and you eat skin and or rice by itself. Families don’t make it a lot, it’s a lot of work, when a lot of guests come during the winter time (that’s when most families make it).

This food reminds me of my background, it’s not a food that everyone knows, it’s special.”

Krishna, Bhutan

“If you start eating once, you don’t want to leave it, you just go on taking more. It’s an amazing food. I thank the person who discovered this food.”

Shiva, Bhutan

“Momo comes in many varieties, meat, veg, fried, steamed, there are so many varieties! In Edmonton, there is Momo House where you can get Momos!”

Killa, South Sudan

“We cook okra many ways. Today I’m going to talk about bamia, it’s red sauce with okra. The ingredients are onion, meat, you can cook with lamb meat or cow meat (beef), and we put tomato, garlic, black pepper, salt, and okra. All of this we cook together, we have a nice, beautiful smell and taste of bamia. Bamia is the cheapest thing in our country. Everyone can afford. It’s very good for your stomach. It’s very light. Everyone likes to eat, especially children.”

Rohit, Bhutan

“My biggest surprise when I came to Edmonton, we love leafy vegetables back home, but here the chicken and meat products are cheaper than vegetables – back home you get to eat meat once in a while, like during an annual ceremony, not readily available and parents can’t afford to buy but very expensive.

In Edmonton they talk about calories intake, we never knew what calories was. We talked about how much kilos you can consume, not calories.
Other big surprise was our food never expired back home. We never had fridge or refrigerator, but here food expires.”

Tek, Bhutan

“Even coke expires, we didn’t know that!”

Mariama, Sierra Leone

“I remember coming to Canada back in 2022. It was very challenging for us for the food, and we were in the guest house, and the people didn’t know- there were no African stores, so they were giving us pasta and stuff we couldn’t eat. One day my uncle was like, they need rice! They need to eat rice. One day we had to go to an African store to try to look for rice or Cassava leaves so we could cook. It was very challenging for us because back home we eat rice, and cassava leaf or potato leaf everyday- that’s our staple food. When we come here we have to eat the pizza or the pasta and most of the food here doesn’t have salt. We put more salt and we cook with a red oil, while here it’s mostly boiling or grilling. It was very challenging for me when I came to Canada with the food.”

Nazi, Kurdistan

“A special food when we make it in our cultures, our hometown, we couldn’t find it here. Even after searching in Arabic stores or malls, where is it? Even if we want it, we cannot find it. Mostly vegetables are hard to find, they grow them differently back home or they grow only back home.”

Justin, South Sudan

“It was weird to see the commercials about ‘real’ beef, ‘real’ this ‘real that’ – what did they have before that? ‘Real’ + label is weird to me.”

Hillury, South Sudan

“The cow we tried [from farm] tasted completely different than the processed food that’s in the restaurant and stays in the freezer for a long time. One thing I do like about Canada is that other cultures can share their foods, but if you don’t accept your culture, then what is your culture to other people? You might reach a point where you don’t understand and fit in different foods and lose some part of yourself.”

Hawler, Kurdistan

“The food is not easily found here and it doesn’t have the same taste…When you grow up here, maybe they have fruits and vegetables in the fridge, it’s got a different taste. The fruit and vegetables back home were delicious, they were fresh.”

Santosh, Bhutan

“When I came to Canada, our whole family were kept in reception house for 15-16 days. In that time what I had experienced that they served me and my family full chicken, grilled chicken with honey garlic sauce, and barbeque sauce. When I took a big bite, I thought it was delicious, but it tastes really sweet, and I put it on the side. After a few minutes or so, I was still hungry. I was looking for a convenience store nearby. Luckily I found Lucky 97 which was located nearby the reception house, and I went there and grabbed some things that I liked, and I had it with coke.”

Sharifa, Kurdistan

“It is difficult to find halal food; after one month we didn’t know there were special stores for Halal food, it was tough to find what we could eat when we first arrived. It was hard to know what had pork in it.

Some of our foods are different here, and some we cannot find here. So sometimes we have to change the recipe, find substitutes.

For example: cheese was also another food – it was a more traditional food; we would bring fresh milk in the village and the specific bacterias are not available here in Canada, so I can’t make cheese the same way.

For example, cucumbers, we make a dish call Mahshi we couldn’t find the same ingredients, the taste is not the same, so it is hard to find it.”

Shareen, Iraq

“I do my own cooking, but I cannot find a real tasty lamb meat here. The meat in Iraq, the lamb is very very different, even what you find here, it’s not the same. The cooking is never the same.”

Essey, Eritrea

“Food back home is a lot more spicy, you come here, it’s all different. Pancakes or waffles we don’t have back home.”

Alise, South Sudan

“Surprised about Canadian food, sometimes the meat is not cooked, you can see the red inside. And sweet food, there’s sugar and honey which I cannot eat in the food in Edmonton; I just cook at home and use my own recipe.”

Hawa, Sierra Leone

“My biggest surprise of food coming to Canada started in the airplane. They kept giving us food we didn’t like- we kept throwing it in the garbage. So when we got to the airport, one of the guys that we met asked if we were hungry, and yes, we’re hungry. We were waiting for the rice, and they brought us Subway (I did not even know the name) with so much chicken and we were like, what is this? Who eats this? We ended up throwing everything in the garbage and we did not eat it- and this guy was so mad… Like back home, you eat to get healthy. When you eat so much food, you get obese and so many things happen to you- you get medical conditions. Back home, we don’t have much, we want more food to eat. But here, we have more but we don’t eat it, cause we’re scared to eat it.”

Shiva, Bhutan

“Back home we didn’t have much food, but here there are so many options. Here you can have varieties of food, there are hundreds of sauces, back home only one sauce. I find it really different.”

Killa, South Sudan

“I see a lot of restaurants and fast foods, I feel they promote people to eat outside while the food is not healthy – a lot of oil, sugar, salt, it’s not healthy for people. Any corner you can see restaurants and fast foods. I also struggle with frozen and canned foods. Back home we cooked every day, organic foods, everything in our country has taste and smell. Even our grass has a smell. Everything has taste, eaten raw or cooked. When we cook here in Canada we have to add beef or chicken stock, you eat meat or chicken you don’t feel it. Thats why our communities go to farms. 6-7 people put money together to buy a cow at a farm and divide… We don’t eat pork in our country. Even the fish here don’t have taste or smell. We struggle eating in this country. Sometimes we give up and eat anything and have problems of diabetes, gain weight. Here veggies don’t have taste or smell. So, we eat meat. But that’s why we have a lot of diabetes, heart attacks, health problems, don’t know what to do. At [grocery stores] many people read ingredients on cans or boxes and because we don’t know always how to read, we don’t know all the chemicals inside. Even when we shop, we need help in this country.”

Tony, South Sudan

“…when I was younger I wasn’t really paying attention, but recently my mom got this meat like Elk (wild animal), it’s a new meat but it’s different from what I usually get. It had a new flavour – it’s better than what I can get in the store.”

Sabahat, Iraq and Kurdistan

“A surprise in 1999, there was no kabab in Edmonton. How am I supposed to live in Edmonton without having kabab? It’s still not like real kabab in Iraq, but it’s kabab.”

Ogot, South Sudan

“A big challenge is explaining or understanding the different types of foods that are available for us. And also too, staying encouraged to eat South Sudanese food, because here there are new foods, new cultures and we want to try different things and we might not want to eat South Sudanese food.”

Hawa and Martha, Sierra Leone

“Our people would farm on land, we would garden and cook fresh. Fish in the river for the day, pick vegetables and cook fresh. Here, after some time when we wanted to garden, they gave us boxes, our people don’t like that. We like to plant directly on the earth, on the land.”

Abdoul, Sierra Leone

“My biggest surprise was when tasting the difference between the quality of food that’s from back home, and food here. I feel like there’s more care taken into when you cook food back home, compared to food here, its mass produced, they don’t really care. Back home, they care what they make, and what’s in it, and all the steps that go into it.”