July has been a month for residents and team members across Schlegel Villages to come together over a shared love of food, as the “Timeless Recipes, Endless Stories” series of events rolls out across the province.
As part of the Wisdom of the Elder Signature Program’s Pursuit of Passions theme, each Village has created opportunities for residents to showcase their favourite dishes. At The Village at University Gates, Main Street in Long-Term Care is jammed with people from both LTC and Retirement, all eager to sample the varied recipes and vote on their top four one Wednesday afternoon.
There are no easy choices when 19 different dishes are spread out on tables along the street; they span the spectrum from sweet desserts—moist banana breads and graham loaves—to comfort foods like macaroni and cheese or Chicken “Popeye” Stew. Many say it was a mistake to have lunch before the tasting began.
Like the events held in other Villages—such as Humber Heights the day before—the recipes and the memories they inspire are centre stage at University Gates today. It’s clear to see, however, that the opportunity for meaningful time spent together between team members, volunteers, and residents is a wonderful side benefit.
Everywhere you turn, people are mingling, laughing, and asking questions about their favourite foods. Some relationships appear to have deepened; take Ray Fagan and Wendy Miller, for example. To see them together, you’d think they were simply friends who, through the process of cooking Ray’s family recipe, discovered how much they have in common.
Ray chose to cook Irish Coddle Soup—something his grandmother always seemed to have on the stove, and which his mother learned to cook after the family moved to Canada. “It’s sort of a poor man’s stew,” he says, combining leftover potatoes from the night before with bacon and sausage from breakfast, plus a pint of beer for good measure.
Of course, it can be much more than that, and he and Wendy—the Village’s Director of Nursing Care—ventured out together to find the best ingredients. The sausage had to be just right, and regular grocery store bacon wouldn’t do. They ended up in the village of Heidelberg at Stemmler’s Meats, which offered the quality Ray was looking for.
The fact that his stew pot was quickly emptied after the tasting began suggests his choices were spot on.
“It’s just so nice to share a bit of your heritage with people and explain to them how it came to be,” Ray says. He could be overheard throughout the event, recounting memories of a different time and place.
But through the act of shopping for ingredients and creating the dish, he and Wendy connected on a deeper level of shared history, illustrating what can happen when time and space are created for meaningful interaction.
“We found a lot of links through this process of cooking together,” Wendy says, “including our mission work in Guatemala.”
For more than a decade, Wendy and a team of volunteers—some with connections to Schlegel Villages—travelled to Guatemala to support families in some of the country’s poorest regions. Through a client he’d grown close to, Ray also found himself volunteering in Guatemala. As they shared stories, it became clear they had likely stayed in the same small compound in a remote mountainside village; their recollections of the place were remarkably similar.
It can be a small world, indeed.
“It was super great connecting with Wendy,” Ray says, noting that the Pursuit of Passions event brought everyone together. “The Village is so cool about doing stuff like this. It made me feel more at home—being able to bring a bit of my home here and share it with everybody.”
