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.

Preventing Food Waste

We served 249 meals today at the Wednesday Community Meal and thanks to our gleaners and donors we also prevented lots of great food from going to waste.

The main reason for the community meal is to feed the hungry but saving food from being tossed is a side benefit.

It's really a shame that so much good food is wasted in the United States when there are so many people going hungry.

On Wednesdays we are helping to fight that in Portland with the help of community gleaners, local businesses and The Oregon Food Bank. Thanks to them we served a beautiful meal made with foods that would have otherwise been tossed.

Here's a taste of the food we saved and served today:

We served a spaghetti squash gratin. The squash and onions in the dish came from The Oregon Food Bank.

These oven roasted tomatoes were a hit and the tomatoes were passed on to us from a non-profit that had extra they couldn't use.

These oranges also were extras that were donated to us. They weren't perfect looking on the outside but they were just fine on the inside - sweet and juicy!

These Italian plums were donated by Linda who works as a volunteer in the kitchen and gleans weekly for us from Good Sam Hospital and Phil's Meat Market.  She had more plums than she could eat and didn't want them to go to waste. Our guest love them because they are easy to eat and super sweet.

These cupcakes were donated to us from Baker & Spice bakery. Volunteer Cheryl who every week makes and serves dessert is a co-owner of the bakery. Yum! We are so lucky to have her on our team.

Every week volunteers go to Starbucks to glean leftover baked goods. We get scones, muffins, pound cake, donuts and all kinds of wonderful treats. Kudos to Starbucks for sharing them instead of tossing them.