Meals

Looking Back at Nourish 2025

Looking Back at Nourish 2025

Nourish 2025 was a powerful celebration of food, community, and connection. From a beautifully collaborative meal prepared by top chefs to stories that highlighted the heart of our mission, the evening brought people together around a shared table and a shared purpose—to nourish Nashville.

Fueling Potential: How Summer Meals Support Youth at the Boys & Girls Club

Fueling Potential: How Summer Meals Support Youth at the Boys & Girls Club

At the Andrew Jackson Clubhouse of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Middle Tennessee, kids are spending the summer learning, growing—and thanks to The Nashville Food Project’s made-from-scratch meals—staying nourished, too.

Through the Sweet Peas Summer Eats for Kids program, sponsored by Jackson®, hundreds of healthy meals are delivered each week to support youth during a time when access to regular food can drop off.

This partnership is part of The Nashville Food Project’s Community Meals program, which brings nutritious food directly to organizations already creating safe, supportive spaces for young people.

Now in its sixth year, the collaboration with Jackson is helping serve over 100,000 meals this summer—fueling not just plates, but potential across the city.

Volunteer Appreciation Week: Community in the Kitchen

It’s National Volunteer Appreciation Week, and we’re celebrating the incredible folks who show up daily to chop veggies, shovel compost, mix dressings, and even sharpen knives! These simple, sometimes un-glamorous tasks are the backbone of the Food Project — but the community members that lend their hands to this work each day are the heart.

Recent Favorites from the Kitchen

Lately in our kitchen, we’ve been getting creative with the gifts of food we steward! Here are a few of our favorite meals to come out of the kitchen as of late:

Julia’s Monte Cristo Bake

In January, we gratefully received a huge donation of hams from Aldi. We relied on a few classic ways to incorporate it into meals — carbonara, pineapple glazed ham, pork fried rice — but 1,800 pounds is a lot of ham! Luckily, our meals director Julia is always thinking creatively about how make the best use of our resources and dreamt up this Monte Cristo bake.

A Monte Cristo is a ham and cheese sandwich dipped in egg and fried up like french toast. Julia deconstructed this beloved sandwich into a casserole and topped it with homemade strawberry sauce and powdered sugar! To round out the breakfast-for-dinner theme, it was delivered alongside roasted breakfast potatoes and fresh fruit smoothies. A nourishing new favorite!

Mary’s Muffulettas

Ever had a New Orleans muffuletta? They're made by layering traditional Sicilian sesame bread with olive salad, salami, ham, mortadella, provolone and swiss cheese. Mary Elizabeth leaned on her Cajun roots and prepared a bunch of these delicious sandwiches to help our partners celebrate Mardi Gras, which fell on the very next day!

She made the best use of what we had on hand and put the Food Project spin on this sandwich, down to an olive salad that mixed traditional ingredients like olives, carrots, celery, red wine vinegar, and oil with some flavorful additions like hearts of palm, artichoke hearts, and banana peppers. It was a tasty lunch right in line with those hearty, rich Mardi Gras flavors!

Six-Layer Thanksgiving Casserole

Who says we have to wait until Thanksgiving to make — and enjoy — dressing? A massive turkey donation and some lingering cans of cranberry put us in the mood for some classic Thanksgiving food this Presidents’ Day, so we decided to combine all of our favorite flavors into one dish.

We started with turkey, pulled by the hands of faithful volunteers, and then topped it with cranberry sauce, mixing it up so that every bite of turkey included that bright, tart cranberry marinade. Then we added green beans, fresh veggies, scratch-made gravy and dressing with all the fixins and baked it into a casserole! It was like the classic Thanksgiving “perfect bite” over and over again.

Kale Yeah!

A recent donation from Harpeth Moon Farms of 150 pounds of kale really had the meals team busy brainstorming all the ways to prepare and share these greens— stewarding a precious, nutritious gift to its highest best use. We share some uses for kale in this post along with a recipe.

Goodbye (and Thank You), Winter: A Reflection on Finding Beauty Even in the Toughest Seasons

Winter holds space for all of us to deal with the hard truths of the year that has just passed. And through the sharp lens of winter’s harsh reality, it gives us something else too: the prospect of new beginnings, and with it, the arrival of spring.

Apple Season Keeps Kitchen Buzzing

Even imperfect apples get put to the highest, best use in our kitchen. The meals team often makes apple sauce— sometimes tossing in other fruits such as berries from the weekly Whole Foods donations or pears from a recent food drive. Fruits like plums even give it a pink hue. We try to make our applesauce as low in sugar as possible (or no sugar when using the sweetest varieties like Fuji). See recipe here.

When the Helpers Need our Help

Our restaurant friends have shown up for us in extraordinary ways over the years with their skilled hands, big hearts, expert knowledge, creativity and efficient work. They’ve taught us through action about service and heaped generosity upon us helping raise thousands to fund our twin goals of cultivating community and alleviating hunger in our beloved city Nashville. They’ve had our backs—and thus, the backs of so many across this city. They’ve shown us all hospitality and provided space for building community at their welcome tables. And now our restaurant friends need us.

Sharing Hope

The blows our Middle Tennessee neighbors have endured since the beginning of March have been enormous. Our local community is entering into this pandemic already tired, afraid, economically strapped, and needing each other’s physical presence more than ever. The calls for social distancing are in direct conflict with our mission “to bring people together,” but our staff are soldiering on to nourish our community in these changing times with our actions, inaction, love, and prayers.

That Special Sauce

In the past year, The Nashville Food Project has cooked and shared over 204,000 made-from-scratch meals with 47 meal sites... which means rain or shine, we're loading up and delivering good food around our city. Last week, I shadowed our Distribution Manager, Emily Novak, for a behind the scenes look at what goes into these meal deliveries…