NURTURING FOOD CULTURE
Homesteading yields happy family life for Laval writer dedicated to inspiring others
All three Bourque children — Noah, 9, Mateo, 7, and Clara, 2 — could beat eggs when they were just 18 months old and butter their own toast barely six months later. A photo in their mother’s just-published cookbook shows Clara at 18 months, deep in concentration while rolling out pizza dough with a child-sized rolling pin.
Noah prepares the buttermilk buckwheat pancakes in Aimée Wimbush-Bourque’s Brown Eggs and Jam Jars (Penguin Canada Books) from scratch in minutes. “Why,” she asks, “would anyone want to use a pancake mix for what you can whip up so easily?”
And one frigid winter afternoon recently, the family’s spacious kitchen was fragrant with the sweet-tart aroma of a batch of applesauce being prepared, under Wimbush-Bourque’s watchful eye, from a pile of Cortands Clara had washed, rinsed and dried, Noah quartered and Mateo strained and then poured into one-pint jars to be processed. Noah transferred the lids to the jars.
When it comes to welcoming her children into the kitchen and teaching them about food and cooking, Wimbush-Bourque, 36, walks the walk.
“Minewasasimpleandunspoiled childhood,” she writes. It instilled in her “a lifelong love of nature and living off the land, of cooking and baking from scratch.” The third of four siblings, Wimbush-Bourque spent seven formative years living on a rural homestead in Yukon without running water or electricity, 80 kilometres from the nearest town; she was home schooled through Grade 9.
The family raised their own produce, kept goats and chickens, and the bread and the yogurt they ate was homemade. By the age of 9, she was baking butter tarts to be sold with other baked goods at the weekend farmers’ market in town.
Wimbush-Bourque had the freedom to experiment in the kitchen, to have fun — and to learn about everything from counting to responsibility. She hopes to inspire her own children to have as much fun in the kitchen as she did.
Brown Eggs and Jam Jars tells the story, still being written, of how she does it — and of how she hopes to inspire other families to create their own food culture, whether through cooking from scratch or homesteading or both.
The book features lovely essays about picnics and backyard grilling, about jam swaps and how kids can learn basic fire-starting skills. Homesteading sections throughout deal with such topics as canning, harvesting maple syrup in one’s backyard (assuming one has maple trees) and building raised garden beds; Wimbush-Bourque went to cooking school and put in time in high-end restaurant kitchens, so she knows what she’s talking about when it comes to food. She’s also the editor of an uberpopular blog about cooking for a family, Simple Bites, and she has a fine way with words and an enthusiastic and empowering can-do attitude.
Wimbush-Bourque spends a fair bit of time in the kitchen, often preparing three meals a day, “and the children learn to emulate what I do. Even in the high chair, they would get used to the sounds and smells of the kitchen, to the texture of food as they played with it,” she said in an interview.
Even when she’d pre-measure ingredients for, say muffins, the children were involved — tasting everything from the baking soda to the chocolate chips. “Sampling is a big part of it,” she said.
And then there are the lessons learned from the land. The spring he was five, Mateo planted peas. He watered the patch and watched in delight as the plants grew — until groundhogs ravaged them. He was upset at first, but he fetched the remaining seeds and replanted the patch. They planted a ring of yellow marigolds around the peas — groundhogs, apparently, don’t like marigolds — and had a discussion about “prevention, faith and perseverance for both gardening and life,” Wimbush-Bourque writes.
The green beans Noah planted in 2013 had grown to six feet when a tornado hit, ruined the garden and downed a giant willow. But no one was hurt — and, with the tree down, the garden would get more sunlight and yield bigger crops in future years. “An opportunity to examine the silver lining,” she writes.
For Wimbush-Bourque and her family, the transition to urban homesteading was gradual: baby steps. The crucial thing about homesteading is to integrate the practice into your lifestyle — whether it’s keeping herbs on the window sill in the kitchen or preserving, she said. “Nobody needs another project,” she said.
Her first Montreal garden was on the balcony of her Plateau MontRoyal apartment. In their first home, she and her husband, engineer Danny Bourque, dug up a portion of the small lawn and planted a large garden. She began to make preserves, using her grandmother’s canning recipes, and started an annual preserve swap.
With their growing family, they visited fruit orchards and U-pick farms. A visit to a beef farm was a way to show their sons where beef comes from — and they bought half a grass-fed cow. They began to compost and started to talk about building a fire pit and getting chickens: They moved from their small South Shore home to a larger property in Laval with a view of a maple forest from the house and space for raised garden beds and a chicken coop. Farm-fresh farm eggs taste way better than commercial eggs, Wimbush-Bourque writes, and “provide a daily reminder to my children of where their food really comes from.”
Little Clara fed the chickens last summer — and harvested the eggs. “Where was the egg before it was stacked in cartons in the supermarket cooler? They can tell you that, and they can also discuss where the egg was before it landed in the nesting box,” she said.
Of course, not everyone wants a flock of hens. Besides, some municipalities,
including the City of Montreal, prohibit the raising of farm animals. Wimbush-Bourque recommends sourcing fresh organic or cage-free eggs from a local farm.
Brown Eggs and Jam Jars features a chapter on Sunday dinner, which can be a lovely family ritual. “It is such an important part of our week,” Wimbush-Bourque said.
There’s also a chapter on bigbatch cooking, which she does weekly: It takes little more effort to make a 16-cup batch of bolognese sauce than a four-cup batch. And she freezes what isn’t needed right away “for when we have busy days or I’m not here.”
The book’s 104 recipes, about 20 of which have appeared on Simple Bites (simplebites.net), are clear and easy to follow — she tested some recipes up to 12 times while developing them — and include family standards and favourites.
Montreal photographers Tim and Angela Chin shot the book’s outstanding photographs — of Wimbush-Bourque and her family and friends, of the food she prepared and of the family’s Laval homestead. The photos “captured our life as it was evolving,” she said. Her father, artist John Wimbush,
did the whimsical illustrations throughout — everything from chickens to canning jars.
Wimbush-Bourque did the cooking and styling for the photos, and used her own props. “To me, everything in it is personal,” she said. She had creative control of the project, and was determined to shoot with no food waste.
“I structured the shots so we could do breakfast first and then plan the day,” she said. “Everything is first take.”
They shot no more than seven recipes a day and she gave away any extra food.
Wimbush-Bourque is the first to say that the homesteading life isn’t always perfect: The squirrels sometimes eat the tomatoes, the cats occasionally deposit headless shrews on the stoop, she knows she won’t win any blue ribbons for her preserve output — and there are always, always, weeds to pull. But that’s not the point.
“It is our day-to-day quality of life that yields contentment,” she writes. “Since we’ve slowed down and focused our attention more on nature and the simpler things in life, we’ve grown closer as a family.”