Letting go of the past and creating something new
Lasagne time!
The author’s mom, Sharon, making the same lasagne her mom made for decades.
A few years ago I came up with the idea of Recipes and Roots to explore my love of food history. I’m someone who loves classic foods, the way things used to be done (from a sustainability angle) and how people live both now and in the past. I am mildly impressed with how many articles I put on the site. It’s seems almost impossible to count. Definitely over 500 and I think maybe around 1000. If I figure out how to calculate it, I’ll update here.
I covered everything that I was curious about. I tried all kinds of ideas to catch readers’ interests. Writing in themes, writing casually, writing academically. I always wrote factually and with a lot of research. I am still me. Even after all that, I still just did “ok” in the blogging world. My goal was simply to monetize it enough that it would pay for itself so I could connect with people and share my thoughts.
The last few months I haven’t been that active. There were times when I was putting multiple posts up a day. Statistically, there wasn’t much difference in interactions. A few of my posts continued to grow in popularity (I’m looking at you Traditional Indigenous Foods in Canada) but no matter how much I explored in similar areas, nothing else got traction.
In May, I hadn’t posted in months. In fact, I wasn’t even thinking about the site. And then I got some awful news. My mom was being moved to hospice. She was a private person so I won’t go into her medical background. I will say, my sister and I drove to join our dad at her side. We cared for her to the end. Among the many tears, immense grief, and lack of sleep there was laughter, there was joy, and there was love. It was a gift.
Somewhere during those days and the weeks that followed I got an email from GoDaddy that the RecipesandRoots.ca domain was up for renewal. I don’t recall that at all. There were probably several notices. I don’t remember. Finally, I got a LAST CHANCE notice and logged in to see what was happening. The only way I could save my domain and website was if I paid an extra $40+ to “recover” it. If I could have thrown my website out the window I would have.
That seemed to be the clincher (as my mom used to say). It was no longer viable in any regard. And ever thrifty, I knew my mom would not have approved!
Still, I had all those pages, all those hours, all that research, and it would just … disappear?
I mulled it over for a while and then, last weekend I went to a Norwegian festival in Red Deer, Alberta. I ate lefse (Norwegian flatbread), Krumkake (crispy, wafer-like cone shaped cookies), and Norwegian almond cake (I don’t know the traditional name). In conversations I was reminded of the rich Nordic history in central Alberta and of heritage sites I had forgotten.
My mom was 50% Finnish and 50% Norwegian and she loved the prairie landscape. The idea came that I could convert Recipes and Roots into a new blog, one that explores my culture, my heritage, and memories of my maternal lineage. Norway has felt close to me for many reasons. I was close to both my mom and my grandma but I am adopted and when I researched my ancestry I found a strong Norwegian line. It is a thread that ties both of my realities together.
In 2014 my sister, mom and I went to Finland for three weeks. We also zipped across the border into Sweden (into the original Ikea) and up north into Norway so that we could check those boxes off our list. I have many memories of that trip that I can share along with food explored, people met, and overlapping genealogy.
Recipes and Roots is still on the site (under archives) but Nordic Prairie Kitchens is the newest endeavour. The focus is more focused and more personal. Through this, I can keep my mom with me, record our stories, learn some new foods and cultures, and hopefully bring people together.
