WATERLOO, Ont. — Lovella Schellenberg had no idea what she was starting when she asked her son to show her how to blog.
Schellenberg, who is Mennonite, lives on a poultry farm she shares with her husband in Abbotsford, B.C.
Until a few years ago, her life was pretty straightforward. Each day, she gathered eggs on the farm and spent time with her grandchildren. Her husband, semi-retired from his job at a Safeway grocery store, didn’t need her help in the barn anymore.
“I needed a project,” says Schellenberg, 52.
But blogging?
Schellenberg says she was intrigued by young women’s blogs that talked about marriage and children. So in late 2006, her son, a computer science graduate, showed her how to set up her own blog, which she called What Matters Most.
Discovering she had a knack for writing and photography, Schellenberg enjoyed posting reflections about family, faith and daily life.
At first, however, she felt guilty about sitting in front of a computer.
“It’s like admitting you have spare time,” she says.
In 2007, when she started adding recipes, beginning with paska, or Easter bread, Schellenberg began receiving a flood of responses from readers.
“I was so thrilled,” she says. “It was about memory . . . stories of growing up and realizing that recipes are part of your memories.”
After she posted the down-home recipes, Schellenberg’s life began to speed up.
Schellenberg, who has an infectious enthusiasm, convinced eight other women, ages 50 to 63, to join her on the blogosphere. And in 2008 they created www.mennonitegirlscancook.blogspot.com.
Its name relates to a comment someone made to her, she says.
“You Mennonite girls sure can cook,” she was told, and the phrase stuck.
The women — five from Fraser Valley, B.C., two from Manitoba and one from Seattle — were drawn together by their love of cooking and hospitality and their strong Christian faith. Every day, they posted recipes that reminded them of good family times and of their Russian Mennonite heritage. Sunday’s blog was devoted to inspirational writings.
The blog had received more than a million visits when it came to the attention of staff members working for the Waterloo distribution centre of Herald Press.
Herald Press is the book-publishing imprint of Mennonite Publishing Network, a ministry of Mennonite Church Canada and Mennonite Church U.S.A. It has published several popular cookbooks over the years, including the classic “More-with-Less Cookbook,” which has sold almost a million copies.
“They were a going concern and they had this vibrant blog,” recalls Ron Rempel of Waterloo, executive director of the Mennonite Publishing Network.
Schellenberg says she had thought about producing a cookbook but hadn’t pursued it.
She believed that “if we are supposed to do a cookbook, I believe a publisher will come to us.”
It’s not the most conventional way of getting a publisher, but it suits the bloggers, who have “a fairly straight-up evangelical faith,” Rempel says, smiling.
The women all met for the first time when the book contract was signed nine months ago. The resulting 208-page, hard-cover cookbook, with beautiful colour photographs taken by the nine women, was released last month. Schellenberg made aprons for them to wear during a photo shoot.
In the first two weeks of sales, Herald Press says, 4,000 copies of the book were sold, Rempel says. The blog has grown to about 2.5 million visits.
The women, most of whom are grandmothers, are donating their royalties to a project of the Mennonite Central Committee — the Good Shepherd Shelter in Ukraine, which provides shelter for about 300 children who were previously living on the street.
The book offers recipes from a group of Mennonite women who are celebrating their Russian Mennonite roots, Rempel says. There are recipes for kartoffelpuffer (potato pancakes), for kotletten (meatballs) and for paska (Easter bread), as well as for comfort foods such as potato salad. Some recipes include gluten-free adaptations.
Because there are so many kinds of cooking represented in the Mennonite faith, “we’ve been careful not to call this Mennonite cooking,” Rempel says. “We also have a Laotian Mennonite church, a Spanish Mennonite church. . . .”
Marlene Epp, an associate professor at Conrad Grebel University College in Waterloo who has carried out an analysis of Mennonite cookbooks, says the bloggers’ cookbook reflects a renaissance in “roots cooking.”
It reflects — mostly among Canadian-born women and men — an interest “in learning to make the foods brought to North America by their mothers and grandmothers,” Epp says.
In this case, the foods are an amalgamation of “Dutch-German-Ukrainian food traditions collected by Mennonites in their various migrations that ended in present-day Russia and Ukraine,” she says.
“So these are ‘ethnic’ foods that became particular to Mennonites at a particular place and time in their history, and are sometimes called ’Mennonite foods’ for that reason.”
Today, Epp says, Mennonites in Waterloo Region eat many kinds of foods from their own ethnic backgrounds — including shoofly pie, borscht, spring rolls and papusas.
Online: Herald Press, www.heraldpress.com