Meal Stories
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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.
We often say that many hearts and hands go into this work. But what exactly do we mean by that? Follow us while we make a beef lasagna to find out!
Meals Coordinator Sarah Farrell shares a quick and easy(ish) way to cut hardy, resilient butternut squash, and we include a few favorite recipes too!
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.
Senior Meals Coordinator Meg Doster cooked up a special treat for the St. Luke’s Community House Pre-K children recently — her family’s favorite French Toast Bake. She shares the recipe and a bit about its backstory with us.
At its very best and most intimate, food is a method of storytelling that can convey the soul of a community—its traditions, its rituals, rhythms and culture. At The Nashville Food Project, we honor this storytelling in different ways.
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.
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.
Now that the summer season is winding down, The Nashville Food Project is officially moving into its “slow” time of the year in terms of food donations. We have been so incredibly lucky this past spring and summer to have amazing produce flooding in on a weekly basis…
The barriers our community face can seem overwhelming. Today's seniors are more likely to have chronic diseases such as diabetes, high cholesterol and obesity than ever before, leading to increasing healthcare costs which further burden seniors living on a fixed income…
Throughout the summer The Nashville Food Project dramatically increased the meals we shared through partner non-profits to an all time high of 7,500 meals weekly to support the summer nutrition needs of children’s programming in addition to our ongoing partnerships…
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…
Last Monday, The Nashville Food Project was excited to participate in a new event held in Nashville this year: Gratefull, a city-wide Thanksgiving potluck. Many Americans celebrate Thanksgiving as a time for reflection and gratitude, shared with loved ones over a meal…
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…
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.