LAC LA BICHE - Glenda Summers is a familiar face at the weekly Lac La Biche Farmers Markets, where she sells her homemade Ukrainian dishes ready for customers to cook up and eat in their own homes. The markets wrapped up for the season just prior to Christmas, giving Summers' fingers a chance for a little holiday rest.
“This market keeps me plenty busy, especially during the holidays,” she said. “Ukrainian Food is very popular in the Lac La Biche area, and I have great community support.”
She makes and sells three main traditional Ukrainian dishes: sour cabbage rolls (Holubtsi), perogies (Varenyky), as well as Perishke/Piroshky/Piroshki, a baked yeast dough filled with a diversity of fillings such as meats, cheese, cabbage, and potatoes.
Summers, whose Ukrainian lineage comes from her mother, said cooking these dishes is a very proud part of her heritage.
“I am very thankful for being able to share in the traditions and in keeping this important part of the Ukrainian heritage alive and to be enjoyed by many others.”
The process she uses for making sour cabbage rolls involves purchasing the cabbage in bulk before setting it all in a brine to ferment in huge bins and crocks as the leaves turn sour. The fermentation process, she says, usually takes about four weeks.
Once this part is done, she cuts the leaves into triangles, which are then filled with a rice and bacon mix, and rolled into small sour cabbage rolls.
“It is a long process but well worth it,” she says.
When cooking perogies, Summers makes a simple dough with vegetable oil and flour and rolls it out into small circles. Each perogy is filled with either a potato, cheddar, or a sauerkraut filling which she has ready and prepared in advance.
“I then pinch each perogy by hand to ensure the filling doesn't leak out upon boiling,” she explained, adding that Ukrainian perogies can be stuffed with sweet or savoury fillings.
Summers shared some interesting history behind Perishke, a popular dish in Eastern Europe that during the Second World War it was used by Ukrainians living in occupied areas to relay hidden messages by using different fillings to signify such covert events as secret meetings and their locations.
To prepare Perishke — which she says is by far her favourite Ukrainian dish — Summers first makes a sweet bread dough. While the dough is rising, she makes a dry cottage cheese-dill filling. Next, she cuts out the dough and fills each with the cottage cheese filling, which is then baked in the oven.
When served, these tasty dishes are warmed and topped with a heavy cream or dill sauce.
A pinch of the dough, some rice and bacon, boiling water ... it all sounds simple enough — but Summers' skills come from generations of experience.
She says her earliest memories of cooking meals and baking date back to when she was 10 years old, and would look through well-worn family cookbooks filled with tried-and-true recipes handed down over the years.
“We grew up on a farm where we all pitched in greatly with cooking big meals and doing all the farm chores and gardening,” she said, adding that in her early adult life, she lost some of the interest for the traditional food. It wasn’t until she had a family of her own that Summers became interested again in learning how to cook the traditional Ukrainian dishes. She asked her mom and her sister to show her the ropes.
In recent years, her mom has been unable to create the meals she once did, so Summers in pleased she can help.
“Currently, my mom can no longer prepare meals for us, so I am so thankful and proud to be able to prepare these meals and dishes to the best of my ability for my mom, friends and family to enjoy,” she said. “The importance of these dishes and family meals was always a huge part of every single occasion…to me this is the way we Ukrainians show our love and friendship.”
Summers' Ukrainian offerings will be once again be available at the Lac La Biche Farmers' Markets when the market season gets underway in the spring.
