British Columbia
Steeped in Story
A tea-blending experience with Chef Sarah Meconse Mierau offers a deeper understanding of the plants, protocols and traditions behind her food.
“Think loving thoughts.”
It isn't the instruction I'm expecting at a tea-blending workshop.
In front of me, glass jars hold dried leaves, flowers and berries I'll soon combine into my own blend. But before we touch any of them, Chef Sarah Meconse Mierau wants us to think about what we're bringing to the process.
“When you're cooking food and touching food or any type of medicine, you have to be thinking loving thoughts,” she tells us.
Sarah calls it cooking with love. It's something she believes most cultures understand intuitively: the meal made by a mother, grandmother or auntie that somehow never tastes quite the same when someone else tries to make it.
Today, she asks us to bring that same intention to our tea.
Photo: Izabela Jaroszynski
Photo: Izabela Jaroszynski
Photo: Chew on This Tasty Tours
Photo: Chew on This Tasty Tours
Photo: Chew on This Tasty Tours
Photo: Chew on This Tasty Tours
I'm at Tradish: The Ancestor Café in Fort Langley, B.C., for an Indigenous culinary experience offered through Chew On This Tasty Tours. Over the next few hours, we'll blend tea and sit down to a lunch prepared by Sarah and her team.
A member of the Sayisi Dene First Nation, Sarah grew up in Vancouver, away from her home community. Her mother was a victim of the '60s Scoop (during which Indigenous children were removed from their families and communities), and Sarah came to learn more about her culture later in life.
A trained chef, she began bringing that knowledge into her work with food.
“When I grew up in the city, I never saw food that was meant for us,” she says. Grocery stores might have Mexican or Asian aisles, she remembers, but never an Indigenous one.
“So when I started my business, I wanted to create a food product that was meant for Indigenous people.”
She started with plant medicine jams, made with organic ingredients and maple syrup instead of refined sugar. But just as important as what went into the jars were the protocols Sarah followed while making them.
Photo: Lise Hines
Photo: Lise Hines
When harvesting, she never takes until she finds three plants and then takes only what she needs. When buying berries from a farmer, she says a prayer and puts tobacco down on the land. From every batch of jam, she also makes a spirit plate to offer to her ancestors.
“We put a little bit of each flavour out onto a plate,” she says. “I take it outside, and we offer it to our ancestors.”
Those practices eventually followed Sarah from the jam jars into the café.
“All of our jams have those protocols, and same with our foods, and everything that we make in the cafe.”
And, today, into our tea.
Before we begin, Sarah offers a prayer of gratitude and invites us to smudge using sage and sweetgrass. "Two of our four sacred medicines,” she says.
Then we gather around the table, peering into the jars, smelling the different plants and spooning our choices into our bowls.
I carefully add sage, elderberry, birch bark, raspberry leaf and stinging nettle to my bowl. As I measure out the plants, Sarah's earlier instruction stays with me. Think loving thoughts. I add in rose petals and rose hips because their beautiful colour calls to me.
Back at the table, I mix the ingredients and fill the pouches Sarah provided to us with my blend to take home.
When we're finished, Sarah and her team bring out lunch: warm bannock tacos topped with chili and a side salad.
Photo: Tradish Canada
Photo: Tradish Canada
Served with samples of Sarah's famous lemonade and plant medicine jams, as well as a jam-filled cookie, the meal feels comforting and generous, and, after everything Sarah has shared with us, filled with loving energy.
Tradish Cafe inside Fort Langley is the setting for my experience with Sarah, but it won't be its permanent home. The culinary experience, now called Nene, a name chosen by Sarah, meaning land, earth or territory, is moving into its next chapter.
Find out more here.
Note: This experience was hosted, but all opinions are my own.