“Food is life. Food is the key to vitality, goodness, happiness, and a strong body and mind.”

Compiled by five women living in Igloolik, Nunavut, this collection of recipes brings together healthy traditional country foods—like seal, Arctic char, and caribou—with store-bought produce to create delicious meals that can be an alternative to pre-packaged foods. With details on food safety and storage, as well as information on how to build a healthy, nutritious diet, this book will help even novice cooks feel empowered to begin cooking from scratch at home.

With tasty recipes from the land and sea—from Arctic char pizza to caribou chili—this beautifully photographed cookbook provides wholesome, hearty meals that will become family favourites for years to come.

Micah Arreak is currently a researcher and translator for Inuit IQ and Oral History at Nunavut Arctic College. She has a great interest in preserving and transmitting cultural knowledge. Hergrandmother, Letia Ajaqqut Panikpachoocho, instilled in her a love of baking bread and bunsand making Inuit traditional foods like “alu,” a dessert made from caribou fat and blueberries.Micah wishes to pass down the knowledge that her ancestor freely gave her and inspire peopleto carry on this Inuit wisdom by mixing and matching traditional and foreign foods for a betterlife. Her favourite food is caribou meat, but she could survive on just aged meat or dried meatslike nikku, qasaarraq, pissi, aujalisaq, and niqittannak.

 

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Annie Désilets’s love story with Nunavut and admiration for Inuit culture started in 2008. Since then, she has developed a passion for cooking and nutrition which she honed by studying at the Institute of Tourism and Hotellerie of Québec. She believes that a homemade lifestyle can be a great source of happiness and hopes to share this vision through this book, making a bridge between her knowledge of Inuit country food and cooking techniques.

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Lucy Kappianaq started cooking at a very early age while helping her mother. As a result, she has become a self-taught cook with a particular interest in world cuisine. She loves to try new recipes and integrate her personal touch of fusion.

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Glenda Kripanik grew up eating and enjoying homemade cooked food. She’s open-minded and is one to always try new things. This has brought Glenda to experiment with her own cooking. She especially enjoys traditional food, her favorite delicacies being maktak and seal.

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Kanadaise Uyarasuk has been cooking for 32 years and is famous in her community for her homemade pies. She learned some of her cooking skills from a chef from New York City years back. In 1999, Kanadaise, along with two other women, cooked a feast for the entire community of Igloolik for the celebrations surrounding the creation of Nunavut.

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