Have you ever wondered how we manage to cook up and serve hot, nutritious meals to around 15 people every single day? Well, it’s all down to a combination of support from partner charities and people donating food, careful planning and organisational skills and inventive and imaginative cooking know-how.
Fareshare To The Rescue
This week we had a fantastic delivery from Fareshare, one our most crucial supporters. If you don’t know about them, they are a UK food redistributor, taking good quality surplus food from across the food industry and getting it to over 10,500 frontline charities, of which we are fortunate to be one! You can check them out here: https://fareshare.org.uk
Anyone for chicken?
This donation will go a long way to helping our incredible inventive and hardworking volunteer chefs cook up some amazing meals for the residents. Here’s a little list of what we received – what would you rustle up with this lot?? I think it might involve chicken!
10 large chickens
11 kilos of chicken breasts
8 packets (32 servings) of Jamie Oliver herby baby potatoes and veg
8 apple crumbles (32 servings)
38 tubes of pringles
10 kilos of sprouts
14 kilos of broccoli
6 kilos of spring cabbage
These were delivered by Jon, our normal delivery guy and all-round smashing bloke, and Ray who according to Jon, has both brains and brawn. Thanks chaps.
Challenge Pete
As always, the challenge is to ensure we make good use of the food delivered.
Some must be used within a few days because it can’t be frozen. We have a dark, cool storage area for the fresh veg which will normally last 7 – 10 days. If we are not using the meat immediately, it is frozen. We always keep an eye on what is in the freezers so we can use the frozen meat in rotation and keep the meals as varied as possible.
In order to minimise waste and reduce the need for top-up purchases, meals are planned taking into account what we have fresh, what is in the freezer and what is in the store, such as cans, jars and dried goods. It’s a bit like ‘Ready Steady Cook’ but on a massive scale!
Tonight’s meal, whipped up by masterchef Pete, was chicken in mushroom sauce with spring veg, finished off with yes, you guessed it, apple crumble!!
