By Lindsay Tice,Staff Writer
Hillview Apartment residents create a cookbook to share family recipes and healthy meal ideas.

LEWISTON – For the past seven years, community gardens have produced many things for Hillview Apartment families: food, friendship, a sense of community.

Now those families want to share. And they’re using family recipes to do it.

“Sharing the Harvest,” a 119-page cookbook, guides novice and experienced chefs through traditional American and ethnic dishes, including Somali sambusa, Irish corned beef and cabbage, and German potato pancakes. Most of the recipes focus heavily on vegetables that can be grown in any Mainer’s back yard.

“I like that you can look in your cookbook, go out in your garden, get something and cook,” said Nancy Davidson, a Hillview resident who helped start the cookbook project nearly two years ago.

The Lots to Gardens program started at Lewiston Housing Authority’s Hillview Apartments seven years ago. Residents tended the vegetables and shared in the harvest. Soon they were also sharing recipes.

Davidson proposed the cookbook as a way to gather all those meal ideas in one place. Lewiston Adult Education agreed to pay more than $2,500 for the book’s layout, design and printing.

People immediately offered their treasured family recipes.

“We wanted people to know our culture, our food,” said Mumina Isse, who sent in two versions of sambusa, a fried egg-roll-like appetizer often eaten in Somalia.

Volunteers also cooked up new ideas.

“There were a lot of recipes that came out of us in the kitchen saying, We’ve got 20 pounds of pumpkins. What else can we make besides pumpkin bread?'” said Kirsten Walter, director of Lots to Gardens.

Of the hundreds submitted, 119 recipes made the final cut. They were easy, inexpensive, nutritious and diverse.

Healthy choices

To appeal to an even wider audience, contributors placed “Healthy Hints” next to recipes that called for mayonnaise, oil or deep frying. Ten recipes, including ones for zucchini bread and fruit smoothies, were translated into Somali. The cookbooks were priced at $15, but copies go for as little as $10 if the buyer can’t afford the full price.

“We just want to make sure cost doesn’t prevent people from accessing it,” Walter said.

Hillview children illustrated the book with more than 100 drawings of carrots, pickles and apples.

The books went on sale after Thanksgiving. Of the 300 copies printed, about 70 have sold already.

Proceeds are funneled back into Lots to Gardens. Some of the money will likely pay for the cookbook’s second printing, Walter said.

Until then, Davidson, who helped start the cookbook with her own family recipes, knows exactly what she’s going to do with the her copy of “Sharing the Harvest.” She’ll give it to her 17-year-old daughter when the daughter leaves home next year.

“She’s going to be able to pass it on,” Davidson said.