If you know a good traditional Inuit recipe, Tungasuvvingat Inuit wants a seat at the table.
The national Inuit resource centre, based in Ottawa, is making a cookbook of submitted recipes called the Healthy Living Cookbook Project.
“The purpose behind creating the cookbook is to promote and encourage urban Inuit to have a better understanding of the role food has in living a healthy lifestyle,” said Malaya Zehr, a representative of the Tungasuvvingat Inuit.
Set to be released in early 2020, the book will be a collection of Inuit recipes meant to promote traditional and healthy meals. It’s open for submissions, meaning that any Inuk in Canada can fire off their best muktuk cooking techniques. Zehr says there are a wide variety of recipes that can be entered.
“Inuit food like muktuk, and caribou, and seal, and of course anything that we can use that is affordable and healthy. You know, vegetables and so on.”
Caribou and broccoli
Some of the submissions so far have been surprising, she said, including a broccoli salad with caribou.
“It was actually really good, so we thought that would be interesting to include,” she said.
So far, they’re getting responses from across Ontario but haven’t seen too much from Labrador yet, she said.
“We want this to be a resource. We want to use this, to be able to share it with our community members,” she said.