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.
Amy and Denise met each other when they were dropping their kids off to kindergarten at a local Nashville elementary school. They clicked, and for the past 20 years have been pretty much inseparable friends. They go on family vacations together, do lunch together, and volunteer at St. Luke’s Kitchen as a Cook Team.
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:
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
When Katie Kuhl of Crossroads Campus approached The Nashville Food Project about providing a meal to be served alongside their Wednesday afternoon self-development and skills training activities, we knew that we wanted to leverage our efforts to support the work the Crossroads team is doing with young people and with animals in our city.
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…
It’s not just about the meal. We want our food to be the backdrop, the engine, the song in the background of all the good work of our partners. A few weeks ago, we received the note below from our amazing meals partner Preston Taylor Ministries - her feedback on a recent meal shared by TNFP with their community…
If you’ve ever volunteered in our kitchens, you know there’s a lot of creativity involved in planning meals based on what seasonal produce is available from our production gardens, along with what food we’ve received as donations…
