Kitchen(er) Helpers Part Deux

After last week's failure of cooking with FNB I was totally pumped to do it this week. I was staying at the house of people who participated in it! Surely it would happen!

But it didn't.

Lets write some background first. Several months ago some friends of a friend came to Vancouver, helped out with FNB there, and slept on my floor for several days.

Since I was in Ontario (and killing time to some extent), I figured I should go see these people and meet my friend who I had never met before (penpal!). I got there just in time for the going away party of two of the people who'd crashed at my place, and it was good to see them again before they left for Germany. It was also good to see my other friends and meet lots of other people.

Later in the week I made the banana (cup)cake recipe from the Sugar and Snails (the dessert half of the FNB cooking zine) and everyone loved them. Hurray!

However, when saturday rolled around, it didn't seem as though anyone was going to be able to do FNB. Several of the people I was staying with were working, and nobody had a vehicle for moving foods from donation site to cooking place to serving place (Vancouver has it so easy with all of these things within just a few blocks of each other). So, unfortunately it didn't happen. Apparently some people took some food stuff and just gave it out without cooking it or whatever, which is good, but not awesome. Hopefully next week, after school has started again, will be better for them (and also Vancouver, where, based on the listserv, nobody was able to go to the serving this week. I hope it went well!).

Kitchen(er ) Helpers

Friday Jim and I did food pick up and got no tomatoes again. We were stunned. Lots of other decent looking stuff though.

Sadly we didn't get vegetables we could make sushi with, but maybe next week I will get to do that.

However, we did get a lot of cauliflower, and excited by that I decided to soak a bunch of the dried chickpeas we got last week so that I could make a chickpea-cauliflower curry. There were no potatoes, but what can you do?

So on Saturday I got to FNB fairly early as I had some errands to run before hand (buying wings, etc.). And it was lucky I did! Otherwise poor Sidney would have been there by herself not knowing what to do (and not being able to do anything as she didn't have keysssss).

I was lacking in keys too, but I had one to the back food storage area, so we were able to bring all the food out, set up the tables, and wash a bunch of pears in preparation of actually doing something. Around 1:45 no keyholder had shown up, but I was able to find one of the people that works at DERA who could open the cupboard with all of our stuff in it.

I hauled out the chickpeas and was like "Um, are they supposed to have lots of weird foam stuff on them?" Well, whatever. I rinsed them off and tossed them into a pot to boil and hoped they'd be ready in time for the serving.

In the meantime we got started chopping up pears and soon other people started arriving to help out. Including three people who were visiting Vancouver from Kitchener. They were friends of a friend and it was super awesome that they decided to come help out at FNB while they were here.

We chopped up onions (saving the frozen ones for when we don't get fresh ones) and garlic to act as bases for the two main food things. Then we made a stew thing with broccoli, spinach, and bell peppers (I think that was it?).

In another pot we cooked the cauliflower and put our single carrot and not enough spices into it. Oh well. About half an hour before the serving we drained the chickpeas and added them to the cauliflower stuff and it actually tasted really good! Success!

I don't know how the other one tasted, and the pears weren't the softest (I think we need a better masher), but Jim's banana bread (cooked using the recipe he submitted to the FNB cooking zine as a guide) turned out well, as usual.

Oh, and we made a fruit salad with bananas, pears, and some apples, and ice tea to drink.

I don't know how the serving went (slower than usual I heard), because I was washing dishes inside. I'll have to ask the Kitchener kids what they thought.

Next week is my last week at Vancouver FNB! Oh no!