thank you Minnesota has millions of families each with distinct stories we've invited three Cooks to share their cultural culinary Journeys with us from family recipes to Brand New Creations the cooks will then show off their skills flavors and Ingenuity competing for the crown to be named the winner the food is delicious and there's room for everyone at our table welcome to the great Minnesota recipe [Music] tonight on the great Minnesota recipe if I have a great family on my dad's side or Lebanese and Native and on my mom's side we're German I've been on a kind of a mission to reclaim our culture and relearn our ways you might want to use this I get out with Elders a lot and learning from them whether it's like the language or stories or about food sovereignty work going out foraging plants so this is a very uh culturally thought out dish so that's what it's all about you know bringing more knowledge education to our communities so they can better nourish themselves and be healthy live happy and good lives funding for the great Minnesota recipe is provided in part by Doherty appliance sales and service Goat Hill Marketplace the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund and viewers like you thank you hello my name is Derek Nicholas we're at Cliff band Ojibwe I grew up outside of Milwaukee and I now reside in Minneapolis on my dad's side or Lebanese a native we didn't practice too much of our native culture because my grandfather was a boarding school survivor and my grandma didn't want to pass on much of that knowledge so I've been on a kind of a mission to reclaim our culture and relearn our ways [Music] I started cooking seriously when I was in college I took on the role of my freshman year as the Native American Garden lead so I was first working with those seeds and keeping the integrity and the songs and stories with those seeds and as those seeds flourish into plants I had to learn how to cook them and offer a community feast in the town that I was living in so I think that's when I really started taking my culinary Journey a lot more serious I've been working at division of Indian work for over two years now as a nutrition program coordinator and I just love it here I have a great team that supports me and the work that I do my day-to-day role may look like cooking for programs so we have a whole bunch of different programs that cater to different groups and I try my best to cook healthy culturally appropriate Foods welcome Derek we're really excited to meet you we were looking at the recipes of all of our chefs and I'm particularly intrigued with yours thank you yeah excited to let you guys try them out I love sharing my food with everybody and then people experience new flavors and new foods into their diets okay I'm really curious you know you say it started with this Garden right who introduced you to that Garden was there anyone in your family or in your community that really kind of like LED you there or was it self-driven well growing up we had a little Garden in our household mostly like strawberries raspberries sunflowers and stuff like that so I was always intrigued within the garden I would be the first one up every morning getting the ripes raspberries and not leaving any for the rest of my family over in college I had to be my supervisor Mary Jo four board that kind of introduced me to the food world and the Food Systems as a whole and kind of ignited that food passion of mine who was your cookie Mentor growing up it has to be with my mom you know my mom would always be cooking new Foods in the house and after every meal she'd ask with that recipe was like a smiley face and if so would be put into the binder and saved in the files for a future reference so I a lot of credit goes to her and expanding my palettes and being able to try new foods today we're doing a flaked walleye salad with the maple vinaigrette it's one of my favorite recipes for the summer time or just really any time of the year and it's very nutritious and a lot of these ingredients are found in the great state of Minnesota that's right looking at a lot of familiar stuff here which is which is fantastic to see yeah so to get started on this recipe we're gonna cook the wild rice and the quinoa together there they have very similar cooking times so the hand harvested wild rice I've got a two to one ratio two cups of water to one cup of rice and then the quinoa is a one-to-one ratio and the reason why I like to use quinoa is because it's a plant from South America and I believe that historians did not give proper credit to the complex trading routes us natives had and so this could have easily made it up its way to North America through some trades and it's a very nutritious food and has a nice texture and some different flavor for the salad recipe today so this salad you can really adjust the quantities to however if you like it so if you want to be more green forward you can add more herbs and leafy greens otherwise if you really like that wild rice and quinoa you can bulk it more in that direction when you season your grains do you usually put you use afterwards or do you put it in your in your cooking water I put in my cooking water so once I had the water add some salt I'm excited this is not your traditional quick five minutes get it done in 30 minutes all right so now we're going to get started on this walleye we got a nice filet of walleye sitting right here and we're just going to do like a very simple seasoning on this we're just going to add some sunflower oil and some salt do you typically use sunflower oil yeah I try to use as much sunflower oil as possible it's a very neutral oil so you don't get like a ton of flavor from it but it's good and so we got oven bacon at like 350 to 375 that's how I like to cook my white fish for the most part and we're just gonna bake this until it's listening you start to see each layer that's how I know it's done so now we can get started some garlic roasted tomatoes that'd be like a nice addition in the salad so we're just going to take some tomatoes put them in pot with some olive oil and some garlic and just have that stew away it's a lot of garlic that's great always our rule at home right we're growing more garlic the better yes if the recipe says one you put in three yep garlic and onion gotta love it now we're just going to put this over like a high to medium Heat do two ladies like to work on the kale and sure we're just going to take them off the stalks and kind of where did this recipe come from is this your own brainchild is this a family recipe I actually collaborated on this with a friend so my friend Kai Gorman Danae Chef we're going to a school in Minneapolis to teach the kids a cooking demo and a nutrition lesson and we're crafting a recipe to make and I had a whole bunch of walleye in my freezer that starting loses life so we kind of need to use it up and we came up with this recipe right here so what we're going to do with this is we're gonna you can like Char like half of it and then have the other half fresh so that's what I'm using the cast iron pan for today beautiful chart it is gorgeous chard this big bowl will be for like our fresh ingredients stuff that's not going to be cooked we don't want to mix our hot ingredients with our cold ingredients because I would really mess up the salad and then we'll use one for the hot ingredients so once it gets like a blistering heat I'm gonna start putting some of this rainbow chard some of this kale on and kind of just like crisp it up almost like you see with like a kale chip or something like that this is going to give like a different texture to the to the salad can you maybe talk a little bit about where and how you fuse your background together yeah um I do it like a lot of different fusions I think that it kind of depends on the audience and who I'm cooking for so I'm German Lebanese and Native American so I kind of tie all those things together but if I'm cooking for strictly native folks then I like the Jews just Native American ingredients and try to feed people in a way that would be culturally appropriate and feed their Spirit as well so it kind of just depends on who I'm cooking for I'd say of the three kind of backgrounds you mentioned you're living in Minnesota now you stated that you're from Wisconsin is it easy to find all the ingredients you want yeah it's just a matter of Knowledge Learning the do's and don'ts for foraging unfortunately right now like a lot of our plants and animals are being threatened to pollution climate change so just being very aware of that you know I'm not like picking food off the side of the road because of all the runoff and pollution trying to do things in a safe way it's a good challenge are there any plans in an urban setting that are easily forged yeah I mean anything they can Harvest dandelions plantains personally and those are just like common weeds they're not necessarily native to the Americas but they're commonly food that grows all around us that people can easily identify and harvest and bring to their diets you mentioned that your background is your family background is Lebanese German and Native correct do you find when you're cooking you kind of lean towards more than the other definitely more of the Native American side I just feel like that food resonates with me better I get a lot more energy from it I feel a lot more stronger and I just prefer like the taste and how it affects my body as well I handle processing those Foods better and then also it's just kind of the community that I work with so it just makes more sense to put more of my energy and focus into working with Native ingredients are there any folks in the native world that I have really been a special mentors or a special help to you as you've been kind of walking this path yeah I'm well Sean Sherman the owner of alumni indigenous Food Lab he kind of helped me get started you know I worked at the indigenous Food Lab right when I came out of college and gave me a place to start and then hope plan again and Elder who I work with she works with dream a lot of health and she's just always gifting me new foods to experiment with and she's very knowledgeable about plants and she's just spitting off a great gift in my life and I'm very valued the time I spend with her there are now new foods again for this dressing today we got some olive oil and I'm just checking the heat here just making sure that it's good in the temp she wants it to be pretty hot when we put down the kale and the rainbow chart all right yes some vinegar we don't want to do too much though so syrup obviously the more the better I got that's right here since I backward wabu our maple syrup very good medicine by the court full every day my dentist might not like it but I do so now we just need a little bit of pepper maybe chop up a couple of these [Music] could give it a try see how it is what does it need anything it's pretty decent I'll put a little bit of more pepper in there though oh geez I literally forgot I got the heat I need these uh Chili Peppers essential put a little sauce in there you're serious about those chili flakes yeah these chili flakes are mild I grew up eating a lot of food with heat my dad really loves spicy food like stores have been doing those like hot food contests Ghost Pepper or anything like that for him the more heat the better so my mom would always try to cater towards him so foreign nutrition Program Coordinator at the division of Indian work so we're a non-profit based out of Minneapolis and we support the urban native community so we have a whole bunch of different programs to help out our communities and offer other resources so as my position as a nutrition program coordinator I cook for all of our programs that need meals so for example we have like a youth leadership development program which are some native kids that come after school to our building we'll help them with their homework tutoring other needs that they have and cook them a healthy nutritious meal we were talking earlier about this and you were saying that there were some challenges with high school kids and getting them excited about foods that maybe they're not familiar with yeah it's kind of difficult to shift someone's diet and it's not going to happen overnight so it's just slowly introducing foods you know if it was up to the kids that have pizza and Hot Takis every day so trying to shift things in a better Direction where they're eating healthier wonderful that sounds amazing you're in all right this while there are some quinoa is done I'm gonna take this off the heat I really really like the the thoughtfulness you put into all the different textures going into this yeah I'm just also all these foods are native to North America you know we can I mean maybe not this kale and swiss chard per se but we can go out and Forge our own leafy greens that we can find all over the forest grounds Peppers you know those Chili Peppers they come from the Americas sunflower seed is one of our four sisters you know we have the corn bean and squash and sometimes the sunflowers our four sister we got the pumpkin seeds which are native got the sunflower oil quinoa wild rice maple syrup so this is a very uh culturally thought out dish yeah so this division of Indian work we're in our downstairs Dakota Lodge and this is the commercial kitchen that I operate out of I cook here for the programs then do a lot of food sovereignty events education around here and just bringing more access to Native Foods within the Metro Community one of our freezers I can pull some stuff out yeah I think this is a good starting point there's kind of some diverse Foods here Pacific Cod Whitefish bone broth this was uh leftover Grouse I think I might take the brain out and make like a like a bird brain omelette we got a couple smoked Ducks this is some new stuff I've never even worked with before I got some bison tongue I think maybe doing some like tacos just chop it up really thinly so the kids don't even know and I got some bites and tail in here as well so this side right here is more of my westernized ingredients and this side right here is my native ingredients so these are kind of like some stuff that I foraged here's some Baroque acorns some Shake Bar chicory this goes up by you guys in Duluth this is modern ashberries you harvest after like the first Frost this is filled up with wild rice and a whole bunch of other goodies I got some cod and some black rock fish some halibuts we've got some really nice King Kodiak Tanner crab we got some beautiful sockeye salmon this is probably the best salmon that you can get in the world we got this is pretty much where all the protein stuff is got a lot of nice ground elk ground bison and over here we got some like bison hot dogs bison bratwursts and we got some nice complacent kidneys and there's also some bones in the bottom of this box Burgers summer sausages hot dogs broths which are great for the kids because they're really familiar with it and you can kind of slowly introduce these Native Foods to them to that way that pretty much sums up my little operation down here we got some good healthy culturally appropriate foods to share for the community and the programs that we cook for whenever I make this recipe a lot of people are very surprised about the kale I find that not many households like kale I just think the bitterness of its Weir the texture and they found that the way that I prepare is very appealing to them so for this recipe I did like half chard so it has like more of the crispy chip type of texture and that flavor than the other half I massage so I just uh take the Kale like this put some like oil on it maybe a little bit of salt and like rub it together and it makes the a lot more tender how did the recipe go when you introduce this to the kids it went good they were able to learn a lot of different skills you know cooking wild rice quinoa making garlic roasted tomatoes cooking fish learning how to work with some leafy greens like this chard and this kale a lot of learning opportunities is that typical of your your career profession where you go into the community and teach kids actually Hands-On cooking is that really common that's something that I like to do we're doing all this work for our future Generations whenever we do any type of work at all we always think about seven generations whether it's seven generations to the past the thing about how our ancestors would have done it or thing of seven generations to the Future and making sure that the generations in the future have same equal or better opportunity or access to certain things and it's a very sustainable model of living and doing things so that's what it's all about you know bringing Better Health bringing more knowledge education to our communities so they can better nourish themselves and be healthy live happy and good lives you mentioned that's a lot of your recipes were from kind of oral history right your current influence obviously is live and active have you thought about building a legacy in either a social media or in a book or something written yeah that's been kind of doing that I published a cookbook a couple years ago when I was my senior year of college yeah then I also founded wastinig LLC I served that up and in September of 2021 so we've been open for about a year and a half and our goal is to create pre-educational resources around food sovereignty and advocacy work so for example I just did a video with our inday Doula expert shoshana craft and I made some white fish bone broth which is traditionally used for Maternal Medicine and then I also did a video with hope Flanagan Lucena and we did the rough Grouse the Binet the original bird and we took out the crop and made a baby rattle out of it and took out the gizzard and made a charm to be a good moccasin maker so this is stuff that I wish I knew growing up and had access to so I'm trying to put it out there in the community so everyone can learn and I want it to be free so everyone has access to it and there's no barriers on the way we're able to make these resources free and pay out elders and make sure that everyone's compensated we do cooking classes cooking demos facilitate exchange cultural exchange classrooms do caterings keynote presentations on food and colonialism and then all those funds get recycled back into the organization so tell me how you check to see if it's done so you can start to see it's really sparkling and glistening then you can kind of start to see each individual flake right here yes each portion that's that's a good way to know it's done otherwise you can put a temperature gauge in it measure it that way so we're gonna let this cool down for brief moments and in the meantime we're gonna take uh tomatoes out to the wild rice chemo out and we're going to let all that stuff cool down it's all coming together here oh yeah a lot of moving Parts but it's coming together so we treat our wild rice like gold you know it's it's so valuable to us so every single Speck every little grain we want to get out we want to make sure that nothing's going to waste now we really honor that plant and the gift that it gave I like how you're talking about using everything that you're um kind of incorporating and even even like the marination yeah really we don't want any food going to waste it's very important to us are you the guy that people come to you and say hey I've got this and I don't know what to do with it and it's now yours that's exactly what happens and I always try to make sure that I share my findings back with the people that shares things with me and get things in return when you're looking for kind of a way to cook a methodology do you find yourself going back to a cookbook Family Recipes or like you know social media internet how do you do your research um that's very tough a lot of Native Foods a lot of that has been lost Native American communities they relied a lot on oral traditions for passing down information and with colonization and the whole genocide of things that happened to our communities a lot of that knowledge was lost so you can't really find it written down you can't find YouTube videos it's just more working with Elders first language speakers try to learn those lost things and bring them back to our communities and try to create resources for them if appropriate it's really important for me because it feeds my spirit we believe in the medicine wheel which represents physical health spiritual health mental health and emotional health so holding on those four ways is like helped me walk in a good way it's really enriching in my life and it's led me to be in the place I'm at now thank you all right so now time to assemble the salad how exciting it is so I got the kale and the rainbow chard that was just massaged and this now we're going to add the charred mixture and so now we got a combination of the two and we're gonna go right in with our wild race and quinoa mixture with the garlic roasted tomatoes in there as well that in and start just mixing it around it's really colorful it is so there we got our Greens in solid now we're going to start flaking this walleye so as you can see we can kind of just peel off these individual layers right here start adding a little bit of the garnish so the pumpkin seed sprinkle that on there all right now we're gonna finish it off with this nice little dressing we got here looks wonderful [Music] I like how you broke apart the walleye it makes it really light and fluffy fish is perfect yeah it is it's delicious and I like the um the Tomato it almost acts as a secondary dressing right thank you so much Derek thank you yes my pleasure great learned so much today thank you it was absolutely delicious next time on the great Minnesota recipe whoa I think I enjoy baking a lot more now with the kids I grew up in St Louis Missouri my parents they owned a Mexican restaurant they kind of taught me how to do everything there cook everything and it was a lot of fun it was a great experience it's a family favorite my husband he requested it almost every week I'd say my mom and I used to make a lot of banana bread together when I was a kid this is really encouraging to see this recipe that your family loves that you have really really made your own funding for the great Minnesota recipe is provided in part by Doherty appliance sales and service Goat Hill Marketplace the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund and viewers like you thank you [Music] thank you