{"id":32622,"date":"2023-07-28T15:46:49","date_gmt":"2023-07-28T21:46:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/chefs-cooking-up-curiosity-about-indigenous-cuisine-and-causes\/"},"modified":"2023-07-28T21:46:49","modified_gmt":"2023-07-28T21:46:49","slug":"chefs-cooking-up-curiosity-about-indigenous-cuisine-and-causes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/chefs-cooking-up-curiosity-about-indigenous-cuisine-and-causes\/","title":{"rendered":"Chefs cooking up curiosity about Indigenous cuisine and causes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Andean
Andean Chef Andrea Murdoch stands in front of her Ute Mountain Ute Blue Cornmeal Swirl cake at the Denver EATSS event at Stanley Marketplace on June 14 in Aurora. She\u2019s one of the five Indigenous chefs who were picked to share a meal with guests. (Emma VandenEinde\/KUNC)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

Chef Andrea Murdoch is busy in the kitchen of the Same Caf\u00e9 in Denver \u2013 a pay-what-you-can restaurant run entirely by volunteers. She commonly uses the kitchen space when she needs an extra oven or two.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything is a combination of Russian roulette and a Rubik\u2019s cube in kitchens,\u201d she said to a volunteer chef, laughing.<\/p>\n

As volunteers take out pans and rip off pieces of parchment paper to cover them, a sweet smell wafts from the ovens. Murdoch is baking her famous light blue sugar cookies for an Indigenous Comic-Con event later that week.<\/p>\n

\"Murdoch
Murdoch places pucks of her blue cornmeal sugar cookies onto a tray at the Same Caf\u00e9 in Denver. She said it\u2019s one of her most popular treats at festivals and events. (Emma VandenEinde\/KUNC)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Murdoch \u2013 one of the Indigenous chefs who\u2019s part of a new wave of Indigenous cuisine in Colorado and other parts of the Mountain West \u2013 doesn\u2019t make cookies like other chefs. Instead of using flour, she\u2019s using Ute Mountain Ute cornmeal found in Southwest Colorado.<\/p>\n

\u201cBlue cornmeal is something that\u2019s very specific to the Four Corners region of the U.S.,\u201d she said. \u201cYou will not find this easily out on the West Coast, out on the East Coast.\u201d<\/p>\n

And this isn\u2019t the first time she\u2019s used unique ingredients in her cooking to support and highlight Indigenous food sources.<\/p>\n

\u201cI sourced locally and Indigenously to support those economies,\u201d she said. \u201cKroger doesn\u2019t need my money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Going back to her origins<\/div>\n

Murdoch\u2019s story is quite the journey, born out of the connection to her culture. She was born an orphan in Caracas, Venezuela, near the Andes Mountains. She was adopted shortly after and came to the United States. She grew up cooking with her family and soon went to culinary school in New York.<\/p>\n

Despite the various places she cooked and traveled, she has always been impacted by the women of Oneida Nation \u2013 only a few hours from Milwaukee. They shared their creation story with her as well as how to make their version of cornbread.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt unlocked something in me where I just felt at home,\u201d she said. \u201d \u2026 Having that kind of cultural experience and mindset, that felt like a reconnection.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Chef
Chef Sean Sherman of the Oglala Lakota tribe forages wild ramps in 2016. He said he always looks forward to chokecherry season. (DThompson1313\/Wikimedia Commons)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Murdoch smiles as she talks to some of the volunteer chefs at the Same Caf\u00e9 in Denver. They helped her prepare her blue cornmeal sugar cookies.<\/p>\n

Soon after, Murdoch wanted to expand Four Directions Cuisine \u2013 her food business \u2013 and create South American cuisine. Through her research, the Andinan chef found the ingredients that were representative of the culture pre-colonial. That refers to any food that existed in America before colonizers arrived, like rabbit or bison.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was tapping in more and more to my ancestry, whether I knew it or not,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She wanted to \u201cgo back to her origins\u201d in her cooking and support Indigenous communities. Her ingredients come from Indigenous or local farmers. She chooses ingredients within the state as much as possible and does what her ancestors did \u2013 live off the land.<\/p>\n

\u201c(I) utilize what is there,\u201d she said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have this, \u2018Oh yeah, just ship it from wherever you are.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

She also taught herself how to forage on her own for ingredients. She shared how she will take her dog and go out by herself as her \u201cquiet time\u201d looking for flowers or spruce tips for her dishes.<\/p>\n

She will frequently talk to the gods and her ancestors while she cooks. Murdoch lays out all the ingredients in front of her and just starts cooking, tapping into what she calls her \u201csixth sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t always approach cooking and creating menus the way most chefs approach it,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s an element of listening to the ingredients and understanding how you\u2019re going to honor them best.\u201d<\/p>\n

While she doesn\u2019t own a brick-and-mortar restaurant yet, she cooks for various events through Four Directions Cuisine \u2013 anything from a mirco-wedding, to cooking classes to a small chef\u2019s table. She loves serving smaller groups because there\u2019s more room for \u201cwhimsy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Murdoch said it\u2019s rewarding to watch Indigenous people reconnect to their ancestral foods \u2013 as well as watching people try new ingredients for the first time.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo see that satisfaction on their face, I\u2019m just like, \u2018Yes, yes,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s what knowledge exchange and cultural exchange in particular is all about.\u201d<\/p>\n

She hopes those who eat her food take away the deeper knowledge of where it comes from and its ties to culture.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way I look at food is respect,\u201d she said. \u201cIt goes back to the Indigenous culture that plants aren\u2019t just plants, they are plant relatives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Native cuisine: becoming popular, yet still hidden<\/div>\n

This type of Indigenous cooking has grown in popularity, with many restaurants opening since the pandemic in big cities such as Minneapolis and Seattle. Some Indigenous chefs are also expanding in the world of cookbooks. And, for the second year in a row, an Indigenous chef won a James Beard award. The James Beard is almost like the Oscars for cooking.<\/p>\n

Murdoch said Indigenous creatives like these have always existed, but they were in limited spaces. She\u2019s excited to finally see their work in the spotlight.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you had told me five years ago that this is what the Indigenous food landscape was going to look like in this country, that we were going to have more restaurants being open, that people were going to say yes and greenlight Indigenous based projects, I probably would have looked at you with so much skepticism,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t always this way, and in some cases, it is still invisible to the public. Many people can\u2019t name even one Native restaurant, and Google often lumps the restaurant category \u201cNative American\u201d with \u201cIndian\u201d or other ethnic restaurants.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven pho, Thai cuisine, like, I can find those restaurants a hundredfold before I find an Indigenous cuisine-based restaurant,\u201d Murdoch said. \u201cAnd we live on the continent of North America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many other Indigenous chefs feel this way. Sean Sherman, the head chef of Owamni in Minnesota and winner of multiple James Beard awards, said many people draw a big question mark when it comes to identifying Indigenous dishes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should really be focused on what\u2019s the true food of North America,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd you can\u2019t understand North American food unless you bring the Indigenous perspective into it.\u201d<\/p>\n

He spoke in a TEDTalk about how the absence of Native restaurants has to do with history. Bison were killed at alarming rates. Indian boarding schools and forced assimilation stripped them of their culture. And pushing Indigenous people onto resource-poor reservations without any land rights put them in a systemic trap.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe just went through a really traumatic time in history where we haven\u2019t had time to heal yet, let alone evolve,\u201d he said. \u201c\u2026 The more you dig into it, the more inequality you see and the more racist structures that you can see that are still built into the system.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sherman is hopeful about the Indigenous food producers, chefs and food trucks that are coming onto the scene, but he said there\u2019s room for more \u2013 as well as more room for understanding.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s just a lot of work to do and there\u2019s a lot of minds to change,\u201d he said. \u201cBut we\u2019re doing it through something very positive, which is food.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s exactly what Murdoch wants to highlight. The work she does for Four Directions Cuisine is not just catering \u2013 she\u2019s hosted fundraising dinners to bring awareness to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives, with proceeds going to the National Indigenous Women\u2019s Resource Center. She also wrote a book about Indian boarding school trauma, with a percentage of the sales going to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, I\u2019m a chef, but I\u2019m using that platform to bring awareness to cultural issues,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Feeding beyond food<\/div>\n

One recent event Murdoch helped with was Denver EATSS, or the Epicurean Award To Support Scholars event, in June. It\u2019s hosted by the American Indian College Fund, which raises tens of millions of dollars each year for students to attend one of the 35 tribal colleges and universities in the nation, including schools in Arizona and New Mexico in the Mountain West.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving access to college experience is a universal challenge, but it\u2019s more so I think, in Indigenous communities where there\u2019s a lot less access to economic resources, there\u2019s a lot less physical access to places to go to college,\u201d said Cheryl Crazy Bull, a Sicangu Lakota and Rosebud Sioux woman, and the College Fund\u2019s CEO. \u201cWe find if we remove those barriers, then we increase Native student participation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The dinner portion of the event sheds light on some common foods that were pre-colonial and how Indigenous people have used these foods for centuries.<\/p>\n

The Indigenous chefs prepared a variety of dishes. Murdoch made a swirl cake using ingredients like popped amaranth, strawberry sauce, edible flowers and the same cornmeal from her sugar cookies. Chef Bradley Dry of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma made a Hen of the Woods Mushroom soup with roasted blue cornmeal and onions.<\/p>\n

\u201c(It\u2019) my homage to my family, because \u2026 I grew up foraging mushrooms with my family,\u201d Dry said. \u201cThis is kind of a mixture of everything I ate as a kid in a soup form.\u201d<\/p>\n

The main food for the event was catered by Tocabe American Indian Eatery in Denver. Ben Jacobs, the eatery\u2019s co-founder and a member of the Osage Nation, did variations on traditional dishes, like blue corn mush, Osage Hominy relish and Three Sisters.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe call that a \u2018Three Sisters, One Bite\u2019 because all three sisters \u2013 corn, beans and squash \u2013 are all in one bite,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have a blue corn chip, white bean pur\u00e9e, butternut squash, New Mexican red chili, amaranth, microgreens, smoke and salt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jacobs shared how his love for cooking was inspired by his parents who opened up a small Native restaurant in Denver in 1989 for the Indigenous community. About 20 years later, Jacobs and his co-founding partner, Matt Chandra, opened Tocabe\u2019s first location. His goal with the restaurant was to make Native cuisine accessible and show others what Native people contribute to the culinary scene.<\/p>\n

Since then, one of Tocabe\u2019s brick-and-mortar locations has shut down and reconverted into a Native ingredient fulfillment center that plans to distribute meals to tribal communities. Jacobs said since the beginning, his work has always been about supporting the community \u2013 not a profit margin.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe point is being able to provide people with food that\u2019s meaningful and not worry about, at the end of the day, mak(ing) money,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re here to make impact.\u201d<\/p>\n

Murdoch wants to do the same. She hopes that by cooking at events like this, she can uplift the cuisine and causes of her community while inviting others into the discovery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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