About a month ago, I cooked up a big pot of a miso vegan stew. It was a Sunday evening, so I knew I needed to cook enough for Sunday night dinner and Monday's lunch. A vendor was taking us out for dinner on Monday, so I needed enough to cover Tuesday's lunch, too. I had plans with a friend on Tuesday night, so I wouldn't have time to cook, so I needed enough for Tuesday dinner and Wednesday lunch, too, so I said, and I quote, "Fuck it. I'll just cook enough for the week." Unfortunately, as I packed away my leftovers that night, I realized that I cooked enough for a week and a half. Normally, that wouldn't be a huge issue, except that I was leaving town Friday morning and wouldn't be back until Monday evening and did not have room in my freezer to store more than a bowl. Luckily, I was able to pawn a few bowls off on coworkers, so it all worked out alright.
However, when I told this story to someone close to me, they said I should think about donating to a community fridge in that situation. I had no idea what that was, so I Googled it and found a community fridge group here in the Memphis area. In case you're unaware of the concept (like I was), a community fridge is a refrigerator/freezer/cabinet/shelves/whatever fucking food storage mechanism someone decides to set up that generally allows 24/7 access to anyone who wants to leave food or anyone who needs to get some food. My local group allows for homecooked meals to be left, and they request that any meals be labeled with potential allergens that they contain.
A few weeks after I learned about the community fridges, the US Federal Government decided they needed to shut down rather than do their fucking jobs. I'm not going to go on a political rant today; I just want to say that, if I decided I didn't want to do my job for a month, my ass would be rightfully fired. Anyway, with that shutdown came a suspension of SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits a.k.a. food stamps a.k.a. EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) a.k.a. a government assistance program that helps people, you know, fucking EAT because we apparently are facing a goddamn food shortage or something since we can't feed everyone. It's a great thing that we don't waste food in this country. I'm sorry; I promise I'll stop raving after this paragraph, but come on, really?
Anyway, I love cooking. I don't have a whole lot of hobbies that I actively pursue as much as cooking. Another hobby of mine, if you weren't aware, is livestreaming. I mainly stream video games and literature reading, but I've also occasionally done software development, music, and cooking streams over the past few years, so I thought, "Hey, why not do some cooking streams making up a bunch of food to donate to community fridges?" So I did that.
For the first stream, I decided to play it a little safe. I normally only cook enough for one person to eat one or two meals, so cooking more than that was going to be a little bit of a challenge for me. Therefore, I made soup. I broke down 2 chickens, roasted and made broth from their bones, and used that broth to make 2 pots of chicken veggie soup. I also simmered some vegetable trimmings for a veggie broth that I used to make a couple pots of a vegan stew. A third chicken was thrown into my pressure cooker and, well, pressure cooked in water to make another pot of broth in which I cooked some scratch-made noodles. I pulled the chicken off the bones and dumped it back into the pot for chicken noodle soup. All in all, I made about 11 gallons of food that I packaged up in quart-sized containers, labeled at my cousin's video game store (The Disc Connection), then delivered to community fridges in a couple different parts of town.
For the second stream, I went in a different direction. For my vegan entree, I roasted some diced eggplants and mixed them with some caramelized parsnip. My non-vegan entrees were roasted pork tenderloin and braised pork loin. I mixed and matched 3 different sides with each of them: scratch-made noodles in a veggie sauce, diced and fried potatoes, and broccoli sauteed with baby bella mushrooms and red onion. This made about another 40 meals (maybe 38? I don't remember exactly), that I labeled at the Disc Connection again and delivered to those same two fridges.
This weekend, I'm hoping to be doing a third community fridge stream, but, whether I stream or not, I'm planning to shoot for 100 meals cooked in a day. I've got about 60 pounds of turkey that I'll be pan roasting; the bones will be used for broth to make gravy and dressing; and I'll be picking up a bunch of apples at the farmer's market this weekend to make apple crisp, apple cobbler, and fried apples. I've already recruited a few friends to help me deliver all of that because my Malibu won't be able to fit it all.
Now, the federal government is back in business for a minute before they decide to grandstand about how they want to take care of the people who are starving because they won't stop grandstanding...sorry. Anyway, the SNAP benefits are starting back up, things are returning to "normal," but, frankly, that's not good enough for me. I'm not going to keep cooking up a ton of food every weekend, but I will be regularly doing cooking streams/videos, both for feeding myself and others, helping to educate others with what little I know, and, hopefully, raising awareness for community fridges and other opportunities that we can look for to help out our communities. I mean, if you've got a little extra left over, why not help someone else? Why not give a shit?
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