Food and dining with dignity is in our mission. We cook and prepare food for our patrons as if we were preparing the food for our own families, for our best friends, for our employers. We believe our patrons deserve the work, creativity and patience put into any other meal we would serve to anyone else. We refuse to put anything on a plate just because we have the ingredients. We look at our ingredients and then think about what we can add to make a dish special. Sometimes we look at the ingredients and say, “we refuse to make the same old dish, what can we make instead?” We also pay attention to the feedback our patrons give us on certain dishes. If there is great feedback on a certain dish, be prepared to see it again in the future. If there is a certain amount of negative feedback, we will scrap that recipe. The steps in creating a recipe or obtaining a recipe for a meal distribution contain a few steps including surveying ingredients, finding recipes, adjusting recipes, and finally, getting creative with recipes!
We must look at our ingredients on hand. As we look at the ingredients we have on hand, we get an idea of the types of meals we can serve for the week. We obtain these ingredients through donations, grants, low cost or free from the Food Bank, or purchasing from other vendors. We try to rotate proteins we use each week so that we do not serve the same protein too many times in a row. So far, we have been able to do this with success.
The second step is to think of a dish or find a recipe that contains those ingredients. Sometimes a dish will easily pop into mind, other times one of us will do a Google search. I have found that the Google search, “Simple upscale recipe for large event” will do. I then find a recipe that contains the ingredients at hand and then go purchase the remaining ingredients. Yes, sometimes it is just that easy, but other times it is not.
Sometimes we must get creative with a recipe. We get a lot of donated produce. It’s healthy, fresh and tastes great. We will put it in sauces, meats, salads or whatever and wherever we can. We hate to see food get wasted, especially fresh produce. Sometimes the creativity is necessary to make a plain meal a more upscale meal. An example of this is going from chicken salad to curried chicken salad with grapes and walnuts or pecans.
The most fun part, note sarcasm, is converting a recipe intended to serve 4-8 to a recipe to serve 150-160. It is not just a matter of just doing some multiplication. It is also a matter of conversion. Teaspoons are converted to cups and cups are converted to quarts or gallons. Free internet tools are a wonderful thing, but this all still takes a lot of time.
When the Auburn Hunger Task Force, Inc. dedicated itself to providing meals with dignity to patrons we dedicated ourselves to working hard for the patrons of the meal distributions. The patrons receive the same food we would serve to anyone else in our lives because they deserve it!
