Flesh and Blood

Andrea Mastrandrea was born into his parents’ Italian bakery in Woodbridge, Ontario. After achieving international success as an architect, he started yearning for the bakery... especially its familiar smells.  So he created Forno Cultura: blending his two loves - beautiful architectural design and delicious baked goods. 

Toshiko and Sid Adilman met in the early 60s. She was from Tokyo and he was from Toronto. After just one week of knowing each other, they took the gamble of their lives. And their enduring love story has more or less stumped their son Nobu who has wondered for years - what his parent's secret recipe was. Then it occurred to him, his biggest clue may be in his mom’s kitchen.

Mike Greenberg made a big decision during the pandemic. He left his chef job at a trendy downtown Toronto restaurant, and went from nine tables to now making more than 5000 meals weekly at the Daily Bread Food Bank’s industrial kitchen. Here, leaning on his grandma’s Emergency Soup recipe, he’s tackling a large and growing crisis in Canada - food insecurity.

One hundred years of colonization, the outlawing of traditional harvesting methods, a global pandemic and the death of Kenton Snache - the man who gave us the fish cake recipe back in 2019. In this conclusion of Kory's story, we are back in Rama First Nation with Kory at his dad’s old house. And we finally make his dad’s famous fish cakes together.

In the second part of Kory’s story we learn how Rama First Nation was always a place for the fish harvest. Elder and story keeper Mark Douglas spent his life safeguarding the story of the 5000-year-old Mnjikaning fishing weirs between Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching. With younger leaders like Kory learning and retelling the story now, Mark feels like he can finally rest. 

For almost 100 years, the Chippewas of Rama were legally forbidden to fish, hunt and harvest on their traditional territories. For Kory Snache, learning to fish was a nighttime clandestine activity under constant police threat. With the Williams Treaties resettled now, Kory takes us spearfishing showing how his community held on to the vital ingredients needed to make his dad’s fish cakes.  

In March of 2020, like much of the rest of the world, Home Cooked abruptly stopped production on the first episode of this season. And for a while there, we weren’t sure we’d get back to it. But when the main subject of the story – with whom we began recording back in the summer of 2019 – continued inviting host Sarah Martin back for more interviews, his story gently and consistently grew, eventually becoming a three-part documentary. Join us for Kory Snache’s fish cakes and a new season of Home Cooked in 2024.

When Ivy’s grandma died, the chef and food writer decided it was high time to finally learn how to make grandma Marthe’s famous tourtière recipe from the Gaspésie. Ivy visits her aunt Jeannine’s kitchen - a world apart from her mother’s hippie homestead kitchen in PEI - to discover her French-Canadian roots. 

Bernadette has a mission: To pass on her Inuit ancestors’ skills in finding and cooking food — in a harsh Arctic environment where harvesting has a whole new meaning, and survival means sharing everything.  On the edge of the Arctic Circle, Bernadette and her old friend Christopher take Sarah out onto the Arctic sea ice to hunt and harvest a whole caribou.

In 1898, during the Gold Rush, Ione Christensen’s grandfather brought to the Yukon a wad of sourdough starter, the essential ingredient in making generation after generation of delicious bread. Ione has achieved many things during her lifetime, but the most significant may be guarding this precious commodity, and keeping its tradition alive — literally.