Episode 1: Mehshi Kusa – Now Online

I’ve entered my first episode, Mehshi Kusa, into a Canada-wide competition called Roots.

The idea of the competition is to produce a short film or multimedia work “a reflection of your identity and consequently what makes Canada what it is today.”

“Mehshi Kusa is the first in what I hope to be a series of inter-generational cooking webisodes. In this video, my grandmother, Rachel Safdie, who is of Syrian descent, teaches me to make Mehshi Kusa, or stuffed zucchini, a recipe that she learned from her mother that has never been written down. As the product of immigration and displacement like so many other Montrealers, food is one of the main ways that my family celebrates our roots, and my grandmother, now 95, is still the head chef.”

I had a great time filming with my grandmother and, especially after hours of editing, the recipe is now engraved in my brain.

My video falls into the third group (third row, third column) and voting opens today (April 1st). The top three videos with the most votes go into the final round.

You have to make an account to vote, which takes about 30 seconds. You can also check out the other section of the competition, Best Multi-Media document.

You can vote at: http://roots.rcinet.ca/vote/

I’ll hopefully be able to post the video here after the competition is over.