Saving The Soup

With no Wednesday Community Meal for two weeks in a row due to Christmas and New Year's Day, we have been accumulating quite the surplus of gleaned soup at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.
 

A bucket of chicken and rice soup gleaned from Good Samaritan Hospital. This was just one of many of the soups we have been accumulating since we haven't had a Wednesday Community Meal for two weeks due to the holidays.

We glean the soup weekly from Good Samaritan Hospital and it is both delicious and nutritious and would be a shame to waste. So yesterday I met with my fellow volunteer community meal organizers, Cheryl and Fred, in the kitchen of the church, with the sole mission of saving the soup.

When we arrived, we found both the freezer and the refrigerator packed with buckets of all kinds of soup -chicken and noodle, lentil, chicken and rice, hot and sour, etc. - so we got right to work.

First off, we heated up two batches of soup to hand out to guests coming to the church for bags of canned food. On Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and Saturday from  10 a.m. to noon, anyone can come to the church for a bag of canned food. We served the soup in disposable cups and it was a well-received ready to eat treat. That used up a little more than three gallons.

Now what to do with the rest?

Lucky for us, one of the volunteers handing out food bags was Ginny who also volunteers at Transition Projects and knew that they could use the soup and had the freezer space to store it. So Ginny took the excess soup there and saved it from going to waste.

And, we have plenty of soup in our freezer for the community meal this coming Wednesday. It will be so good to get back on a regular schedule and back to serving our wonderful guests.