Celebrating the Summer Harvest

On a recent Saturday the Wedgewood Neighbors Community garden teamed up with the McGruder Green Thumbers Community garden for their Summer Harvest Potluck Celebration. These celebrations are held at the end of each season (spring, summer, and fall) as a way to toast the previous season, share accomplishments, and show other gardeners how they prepare their harvest. 

This season’s event at McGruder celebrated more than just a successful summer growing season. The United Way Family Resource Center welcomed a new lead agency and several new nonprofit partners to better serve its North Nashville community. We opened up the celebration and invited The Nashville Food Project staff, the entire staff at the McGruder Family Resource Center, as well as The Little Pantry that Could participants. 

It was a great way for our community gardeners to welcome the new organizations in the building while also showing off their amazing garden. The grill was hot, the food was flowing, and there were plenty of laughs to go around as people shared picnic tables and stories of either their gardening adventures or humorous attempts

Guest Chef Series: Hal Holden-Bache and Jaime Miller of Lockeland Table

Chef Hal Holden-Bache of Lockeland Table has been cooking with love in his heart since at least age 8. That’s when he began giving his “hard-working mother some time off,” he says. “I enjoyed cooking more than I did my homework. She allowed me to do that.”

He also realized he liked to cook because he liked to eat. “At some point in time you gotta learn to feed yourself,” he says.

The love--and independence--that comes along with learning to cook was a theme important to both Holden-Bache and Lockeland'sPastry Chef Jaime Miller. The two chefs visited The Nashville Food Project this year as volunteers.

Jaime, a chef-participant in TNFP's first RISE event last December, took an interest in hospitality as a way to find freedom in life. She wanted to be on her own at age 15. So, she graduated high school early and found work in restaurants as soon as she could. But even as she sought independence, the experiences helped her appreciate family. “It made me realize how talented my mom was,” she says.

At The Nashville Food Project, Miller and Holden-Bache’s experience and talent showed as they floated effortlessly around the kitchen to prepare a gourmet meal for 75 men and women who reside at the John Glenn Residential Center in North Nashville.

The ingredients for their meal had been gleaned or donated from at least six different sources. Miller worked on a sheet pan of cubed sweet potatoes from Delvin Farms laced with kale that had been donated from a local catered event. She added apple gleaned from Whole Foods Market along with raisins and garlic before drizzling it with honey and slipping it into the oven.

Meanwhile, Holden-Bache prepped pork loin and pancetta donated earlier this year after a meat conference at Gaylord Opryland Hotel. He flavored the pork with onion, mushroom and sherry from TNFP cupboards.

The community effort that is cooking in the TNFP kitchens was a perfect match for these talented chefs.

Community, after all, is a word that’s important to both Holden-Bache and Miller. They begin dinner service at the restaurant each night with Community Hour, a play on Happy Hour that offers a portion of proceeds from specially priced drinks and small plates to local causes.

Holden-Bache preferred “community table” over “café or restaurant” when naming his place. Because in thinking about feeding Nashville, he wanted to say: “We’re here for you.” 

And he also says he felt drawn to the word community while reading TNFP’s mission statement: Bringing people together to grow, cook and share nourishing food, with the goals of cultivating community and alleviating hunger in our city.

“Food should be something we’re all able to do,” he says both in terms of access and preparation. He’s careful not to take it for granted by working to reduce food waste at the restaurant, to give back when he can and to reflect on his good fortune when he enjoys a meal.

“This is so good,” he recalled saying between bites to a friend recently, “We’re lucky, man.” 

Chef Holden-Bache looks through gleaned food from Whole Foods with Meals Director Anne Sale. 

The chef checks out TNFP's kitchen garden at Woodmont. 

Herbs pulled from TNFP's kitchen garden will go into the dish. 

Chefs Holden-Bache and Miller pause to taste during the cooking process.

Small Changes with BIG Impact

This week The Nashville Food Project will share more than double the meals we served this week last year! In a "normal" week (we're always figuring out what that means), we’re currently sharing 3,000 delicious, nutritious meals and snacks each week as compared to 1,200 weekly meals only a year ago. This growth is the result of adding a second kitchen to our ranks, increasing meal prep opportunities for volunteers and the smart-working instinct and intellect of our meals team. But it's also due in large part to an intentional transition in the way that many of our meals are shared.

While our volunteers still share many of our meals in parking lots alongside our food trucks, now roughly 2,200 of the meals and snacks we make each week are delivered to and served by our community partners. Of these 2,200 meals, roughly 900 are prepared in our South Hall kitchen by incredible volunteers and then loaded into our food trucks to be delivered to our meal distribution partners by our staff. The nonprofit partner handles the coordination and facilitation of sharing the meal with its clients and in its community.

This change was made in response to the needs expressed by our community partners. Many came to us with the same problem and asked us how we might be of the solution: They knew that offering a meal or some food for their clients and communities would improve participation and engagement in their programs, but lacking the time and know-how, many were spending their precious resources on pizza and fast food. These partners wanted a way to strengthen their programs with food they would be proud to serve. At the same time, we at The Nashville Food Project were actively looking for ways to broaden the impact of our meals, so that they might come alongside some other kinds of work and programming to alleviate the burdens of being poor.

The Contributor is just one of our partners who serve a TNFP meal alongside their programming. This is a lunch served with their weekly new vendor trainings.

A significant change in our meals structure also meant we needed to make a change in our food trucks, and we have longtime corporate partner and enthusiastic supporter Triumph Aerostructures to thank for making that happen! Over the past few months, Triumph modified our food trucks to provide capacity to hold 24 full-size catering pans at temperature on each truck. This means that on a single itinerary we can now share up to 300 meals and snacks in the community! It’s been a small change that has had a BIG impact on how we're working to cultivate community and alleviate hunger in our city.

Driver side & back flap: 3 insulated food carriers installed in each location - maximizes storage capacity & allows all food to be transported with temperature control

Passenger side: space for market-style display of fresh produce or sack lunch items

Nourish Nashville

Nourish 2016 did not disappoint! In its fifth year, the event raised more than $135,000 in support of The Nashville Food Project’s mission to grow, cook and share nourishing food.

This year’s event, held on July 28th at the Hutton Hotel, brought together 275 friends of The Nashville Food Project to celebrate recent accomplishments and enjoy an exquisite meal prepared by six of the Southeast’s most notable chefs.

The evening kicked off with margaritas prepared by Chipotle Mexican Grill, served alongside several delicious Mexican-inspired hors d’ouevres from Chef Nick Hertel of Merchants. Attendees ate and mingled while perusing the silent auction, which featured nearly 80 packages thanks to the generosity of our Nashville community.

Guests then gathered at the table to enjoy a five-course meal paired with wines from Lipman Brothers. Local food writer and friend of the Food Project Chris Chamberlain elicited many laughs from the stage as emcee of this year's event. The dinner included watermelon salad by Chef Bill Smith of Chapel Hill’s Crook’s Corner, curried catfish and grits by Chef Asha Gomez of Atlanta’s Spice to Table, Bear Creek Farms pork belly by Chef Matt Bell of Little Rock’s South on Main, and beef by Chef Cole Ellis of Cleveland, MS’s Delta Meat Market. After a rousing live auction, guests enjoyed a blueberry posset by Butcher & Bee’s Cynthia Wong as well as take-home cookies from Christie Cookie Co. on their way out.

Huge thanks to all in attendance at Nourish this year. A special thanks to our sponsors for making this year’s Nourish possible: First Tennessee Foundation, Chipotle Mexican Grill, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee Community Trust, Dorothy Cate and Thomas F. Frist Foundation and Whole Foods Market. We also want to thank our patrons, live and silent auction donors and in-kind sponsors for supporting this annual fundraising event. We are grateful to you for believing in and supporting the important work of The Nashville Food Project. Click through the photos below to see the night's highlights.

Achaar - A Taste of Asia

We’ve reached that glorious time in Tennessee summers when tomatoes hang heavy from the vine, begging to be plucked and sliced or tossed into the mouth like candy when cherry-sized. 

It’s a time for BLTs and marinara sauces, tomato pies and fresh salsas.

But when we asked the farmers of Growing Together what to do with tomatoes for sampling at the Nashville Farmers’ Market, they suggested achaar.

Achaar, a tomato-based chutney popular in Bhutanese and Nepali cuisine, can be made in a variety of combinations that might include cilantro or mint, peppers and tomatoes. It’s often served alongside lentils and basmati rice, adding zap and zing to the meal. 

Since the Growing Together farmers also happen to grow arugula, we included the spicy green leaves with this version called Golbheda ko Achaar. Roasting the tomatoes deepens the entire dish with rich flavor. 

We paired samples of achaar with slices of baguette from Village Bakery & Provisions, a fantastic shop inside the Market House. And we’re happy to report that the little cups of spicy tomato flew off our table at the market. 

We hope you’ll visit the Growing Together farmers at their Nashville Farmers’ Market booth on Saturday, August 20 from 8am to 2:30pm.  We’ll send you home with a taste of achaar while supplies last—or at least some tomatoes and the recipe to make it at home!

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Golbheda ko Achaar (Tomato Chutney)

This dish is a favorite in Bhutanese and Nepali cultures, and it has many variations with mint or cilantro instead of arugula, for example. It’s generally served as an accompaniment to lentils and rice or bread. 

Makes about 4 servings

Ingredients:

Four medium-sized tomatoes or a couple handfuls of cherry tomatoes
Olive oil for baking dish and tomatoes
Salt and pepper to season plus 1 teaspoon for the arugula paste
A handful of arugula
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon red chile flake
1/4 teaspoon of coriander
1/4 teaspoon cumin
Pinch of turmeric
Squeeze of fresh lime juice

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Oil a baking dish. Wash and half the larger tomatoes and lightly coat them in oil as well. Arrange the tomatoes in the baking dish in a single layer with their cut sides up and sprinkle lightly with salt. Roast the tomatoes until their skins are wrinkled and browning in places about 1 hour.

While the tomatoes roast, combine 1 teaspoon salt with arugula in a mortar and pestle. Crush the two ingredients together until a paste forms. (If you don’t have a mortar and pestle, you can use the bottom of a clean jelly jar or coffee mug to grind ingredients on a cutting board.) 

Gently peel the skins from the tomatoes and combine the tomatoes with the arugula mixture and remaining spices. Taste and add a squeeze of lime juice or so to your liking. Adjust seasoning, if needed, and serve alongside lentils or curry dishes as a small side dish or flavorful condiment.

Adapted recipe from thegundruk.com

Celebrating Interdependence on Independence Day

It’s not every day that you get a request from a volunteer group for ideas for “something big” to partner on, but that’s just what happened with local restaurant group Strategic Hospitality. 

After volunteering a few times in our kitchen and gardens, they wanted to work with The Nashville Food Project to involve more of their staff in our work, and to make a splash in the community. Because Strategic Hospitality already has a community relationship with the veteran-services organization Operation Stand Down and because many Strategic Hospitality employees are veterans themselves, it was clear that an event in which their employees could interact with the veterans would be a great opportunity to build relationships over a community meal, especially this time of year as we were approaching the July 4th holiday. 

Last Wednesday, our three organizations teamed up to host a special nearly-July 4th celebration with the Operation Stand Down veterans and the employees at Strategic Hospitality. The Nashville Food Project provided the meal, Operation Stand Down provided the space, and Strategic Hospitality provided fun games and activities!

The day started when Chef Jason Brumm, Strategic Hospitality’s Culinary Director, and his team arrived at our Woodmont kitchen and began preparing a hearty meal of chicken stir-fry loaded with vegetables over rice with Strategic Hospitality’s incredible cauliflower salad and a cookie donated from Christie Cookie Co. We led the chefs through the garden out back, where they snipped tons of fresh herbs to liven up the meal, and then they were off! 

At around 11:00AM, volunteers from American Legion Post 5 arrived to load up the food truck and share the meal. These veterans volunteer regularly on our trucks through FiftyForward’s Retired and Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP), and it just so happened that their week fell during this great event to celebrate our vets.

By 11:30 the RSVP volunteers were ready to share this tasty meal with the veterans at Operation Stand Down, the surrounding community and the Strategic Hospitality employees. Looking through the crowd, it was clear that relationships were forming over this meal. All in all, this was a great event! Thanks to everyone who played a part.

Growing Safe Spaces for Community

When most people think about The Nashville Food Project’s gardens, they think about the food grown for use in the meals that we share in our community. Last year alone, our staff, with the help of hundreds of garden volunteers, harvested more than 4,000 pounds of organic produce from our gardens, all of which was incorporated into tens of thousands of healthy, made-from-scratch meals.

But what many don’t realize is that our gardens are also spaces where several communities are coming together in a common desire to grow good food and get to know one another better. Our gardens truly are their gardens—spaces where families and individuals can build connections with one another in beautiful spaces they can call their own.

We spent some time in the Wedgewood Urban Garden (WUG) the past few days and want to share stories from four different communities who come together there to grow food and deepen relationships, and create spaces of their own:

The Refuge

One Friday morning, we joined families from the Refugee Agricultural Program that we support alongside the Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee. We met with families from Bhutan and Burma who grow gardens at WUG. Having been displaced from their native countries, creating safe places is critical for these men and women, many of whom come from farming and agrarian backgrounds. Many of these families had never met one another until they began growing food at WUG, but they have now built a community that grows together and shares the fruits of their labor by exchanging vegetables, stories and life!

Volunteer Groups

While many of the refugee families were packing up on Friday morning, a group of religious studies students from Belmont University arrived at WUG to tour the garden and volunteer. Garden intern Nathaniel led the group around the garden beds, telling them about the incredible ecosystem that we have built there, including bees, chickens, pollinators and even goldfish! The students soaked up the information and then came together to pitch in and volunteer. Many remarked how interesting it was to see so many different aspects of urban agriculture - production gardens, community gardens, animal raising - all together in this one small place.

Harvest Hands

On Tuesday morning, the garden welcomed children from Harvest Hands for their weekly garden-based education activities. These activities get the kids engaged in the garden so they can learn about where their food comes from and the importance of making healthy decisions when they eat. This week, all-star food project volunteer Linda Bodfish taught the kids about plant families and how they share similar characteristics while also being different. They learned about kale, chard, lettuce and sorrel and experienced the tastes, textures and smells of these green leafy vegetables. Then they talked about the differences between fruits and vegetables and tasted their way through the lower garden.

Friends Life

As the Harvest Hands children left the garden, our Friends from Friends Life Community pulled in for their regular volunteer time at WUG. Friends Life Community is a nonprofit that serves the needs of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We’ve been lucky to have the Friends join us in the garden each week for service learning activities for years! There our Friends learn about gardening and food, and they help us in growing the food we include in our meals. Earlier this year, we began sharing meals with Friends Life, bringing it full circle for the participants in their programs. Now the Friends love their garden time even more because they get to enjoy all of the fresh food they’ve worked so hard to help grow.

Over the course of just two days, we watched in gratitude as each of these very different groups cultivated their own unique communities within the fences surrounding Wedgewood Urban Garden. We give thanks that these communities can come together in this safe space to learn about food, share cultural experiences and work towards their own goals. We welcome you to our gardens and invite you to do the same…

Nutrition Education - Strengthening our Relationships with Food & Each Other

by Kathleen Costello, AmeriCorps VISTA Nutrition Education Coordinator

Hello all! I joined The Nashville Food Project's staff earlier this year as a member of Americorps’ Anti-Hunger and Opportunity Corps (AHOC). AHOC places Americorps members at different organizations throughout the county that are committed to reducing hunger in their local community. 

My role at The Nashville Food Project involves creating nutrition education opportunities for several of TNFP’s community partners. These activities include inviting students to our kitchen to make healthy snacks, teaching hands-on cooking classes at summer camps, and leading food demonstrations with some of our community partner organizations. 

I just finished providing hands-on cooking sessions at the PENCIL Foundation’s summer camp. This two-week camp taught students about environmental issues such as pollution and water conservation through fun activities, speakers, and field trips. The Nashville Food Project provided lunch twice a week, and I got to lead the kids in cooking classes that had an environmental component. For one of our sessions, we made local “berry scones” with raspberries picked from our Wedgewood Urban Gardens. Besides being insanely delicious (I ate three) it gave students the opportunity to see how many miles non-local food travels compared to locally grown food. Just purchasing two local ingredients for this recipe—cream and raspberries—saved over 4,000 miles of food travel!

(For a peek at how far a non-local strawberry travels to get to a consumer, take a look at this great video from the Ad Council.)

Another nutrition class underway is at Nashville CARES, an organization that provides resources and support to people diagnosed with or at risk of contracting HIV. Every other Wednesday, I bring a hot, made-from-scratch lunch made by our volunteers, and I give a cooking demonstration for one of the meal components. I remember being so nervous for my first class…how would these strong individuals who are dealing with a serious immune disease going to react to this fidgety 20-something intern encouraging them to eat more vegetables? I was taught that the most important part of teaching is connecting with your students… but how could I connect with an audience so seemingly-different from me?

It turns out the answer was pasta salad. I asked about their favorite foods, and Margaret, a fiery grandmother with glittery fingernails, told me how she loves pasta salad, but wanted to learn some new ways to make it. I shared the first pasta salad recipe I’d ever made, someone else mentioned his mother’s go-to ingredient (Italian salad dressing) and the conversation rolled on from there. This week, per Margaret’s request, I’m going to show them how to make a pesto pasta salad made from carrot tops. I guess we aren’t so different after all.

Before my experience at The Nashville Food Project, I thought the most important part of being an educator was walking into the room with all of the answers. But the more time I spend with such amazing and unique individuals, the more I realize that my job is not to provide the right answers, but to ask the right questions. It’s about understanding people and what drives the food choices they make. It’s about working together to find out what the barriers are to making healthy choices, and how we can break those down and build new, healthier relationships with food and each other.

It most likely also involves a freshly baked scone and a killer pasta salad recipe. 

Sharing Food & Changing Lives With Two New Partners

The food truck is a somewhat iconic image in the history of The Nashville Food Project. Since our earliest days, we’ve been driving these trucks all over the city, delivering meals to those who need them. Before the hot meals, before the gardens, we had the trucks. Nearly every new volunteer or visitor we meet asks us “I’ve seen the food trucks, but where do they go? Who are these meals shared with?”

The way we share our meals truly is what makes The Nashville Food Project “us.” All of our meals are shared in collaboration with community partners that support the various communities we feed, and right now we are working with over 20 organizations to share hot, healthy meals and snacks in our city. As each partner is different, so is each meal service. Just looking at two of our newest partners, you can see the varied ways our meals are shared to support our community:

Preston Taylor Ministries at St. Luke’s Community House

You’ve probably heard that we’ve partnered with St. Luke’s Community House to open a second kitchen and provide daily meals for their preschool and senior mobile meals program, but you may not have heard that we’re also partnering with a St. Luke’s partner at St. Luke’s. 

Preston Taylor Ministries is the newest partner at St. Luke’s, facilitating the United Way Family Resource Center’s after-school and summer programming. As a site for the SPARK program (Sports, Play and Active Recreation for Kids), programming has an enhanced focus on promoting an active lifestyle. Twice each week, we provide healthy snacks for 85 kids. These snacks, along with the SPARK programming, are helping kids develop a healthier lifestyle, which has been shown to improve academic performance and behavior. We will soon begin a once monthly sit-down meals open to all Preston Taylor Ministries families and the surrounding neighborhood to develop stronger community and reduce the isolation so often accompanying poverty.

The Family Center

The Family Center prevents child abuse and neglect by empowering parents to raise happy, healthy children. The Nurturing Home Program serves Families First families in Davidson County with both group and in-home parenting sessions. 

The Nashville Food Project recently began providing a weekly family meal to support a Nurturing Home group session. Each week, a table topic accompanies the meal to introduce the evening’s session. For example, if Nurturing Home is covering Feelings and Building Empathy, the families begin the evening by sharing a meal and introducing themselves to the other group members and stating one feeling they had that day. This meal and discussion is helping to bring together participating children and parents for important support and sharing.  

Here at The Nashville Food Project, we know that nothing brings people together and breaks down walls quite like a good meal. These new partners show just a couple of ways that that is happening every day in our city. Poverty is a cycle that requires more than just food to break, and these partners are helping us do that by providing valuable programming that betters the lives of all those who come together over our meals. 

Growing Together at the Nashville Farmers' Market

The Nashville Farmers Market hosted record-breaking crowds this month to kick off the warm season, and we’ve been thrilled to be a part of it as "Growing Together," the new name for the Refugee Agricultural Partnership Program, a partnership between The Nashville Food Project and the Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee.

For the first time, the farmers of Growing Together harvested produce they’ve been growing since early March to sell at the market. Baskets have been overflowing with vibrant komatsuma, a Japanese mustard spinach, and several additional varieties of mustard greens such as sueling and giant red leaf. The farmers also harvested crops like joi choi (a type of bok choy), arugula, cilantro, dill, hakurei turnips and daikon radish.

Each week, two farmers in the collective attend the market to represent the group such as Thomas Piang of Burma and Chandra Paudel of Bhutan, pictured above. We’ve been providing profiles of the farmers along with recipes for featured produce.

Thank you to all the customers who have visited with us so far such as Chef Sam Tucker of Village Bakery & Provisions inside the Market House. He picked up an armful of joi choi during our first market.

Chef Sam with our farm shed neighbor Victoria of Lucy Bird Kitchen.

We were delighted to see it in subsequent weeks on his menu sauteed with brown butter, chili and lemon.

Come see us this season at the market. We’ll be there every Saturday through September.  We look forward to showing you this gorgeous produce!

Oven-Roasted Strawberry and Rosemary Jam

If you haven't met loyal TNFP volunteer and board member Judy Wright, then you are missing out! Judy cooks regularly in our kitchen and she shares with us so many great recipes (Judy's Mom's Meatloaf, anyone?) and tips for the kitchen and garden. Judy regularly shares her impressive knowledge through her blog at JudysChickens.org, and periodically we'll be sharing some of those posts. Today we've got a great post from Judy on a TNFP recipe - oven-roasted strawberry and rosemary jam.

Summer. In. A. Jar. The local strawberry season is too short for many of us; just six weeks. Have you ever wanted to capture the smell and flavor of a just-picked, warm, lusciously ripe strawberry? If so, try making a jar of this oven-roasted strawberry and rosemary jam with a touch of lemon juice or balsamic vinegar. This recipe was given to me by my friend, Malinda Hersh, Associate Director at The Nashville Food Project, and it is easy to make.

Malinda made this jam three years ago, packaged in half-pint mason jars, for TNFP’s deluxe gift baskets prepared for attendees of the Nourish Patron’s Party held annually at the legendary Bluebird Cafe. Inspired by Malinda’s gift, I have been making my own small batch of this jam every year since, as soon as the venerable Tennessee strawberries come in. Nourish is a Nashville fundraiser which brings together the South’s most innovative chefs for an evening of delicious food and wine. This year the event will take place on July 28th at the Hutton.

The idea for this post started last week when I read in Edible Nashville, a gorgeous publication on local food trends, for which I am now a contributing writer on gardening(!!), that the first Tennessee strawberries were starting to come in. On a whim, I emailed Hank Delvin at Delvin Farms at 7:00 A.M. to tell him I had this fabulous recipe for roasted strawberry jam that I wanted to make and by-the-way, I was looking for ripe strawberries. He said they were getting ready to pick that morning and invited me to come along.

I love driving out to Delvin Farms in College Grove, Tennessee. It’s a beautiful drive, and I know I’ll always learn something new about botany and organic growing practices from Hank, and his dad if he’s around. Check out this post from last year when I chronicled a morning spent gleaning vegetables for TNFP at Delvin Farms. The most interesting tidbit I learned on my most recent trip was the concept of incomplete pollination. Like for many of you, I’ve seen the results of incomplete pollination, misshapen berries like the ones in the picture below, I just didn’t know there was a name or reason for it.

By the way, misshapen isn’t alway ugly. Look at this amazing strawberry I found in the field. My friend, Roberta, said it looks like an angel. Indeed.

Hank plants new June-bearing strawberry plants in long rows of plastic-covered raised beds every September. The plastic keeps the weeds out, since, as an organic farm, they do not use chemical weed-killers.

The plants go dormant in the winter and start growing again in the spring. Once the delicate flowers start blooming, it is imperative that the tender blooms be protected from frost.

To this end, whenever the temperature dips, Hank’s staff has to cover the rows of strawberries with agricultural cloth. This past spring there were six such frosts in the three weeks preceding their first harvest.

Strawberries are considered self-pollinators and as such, their male and female parts are on the same flower. It takes gravity, the wind, rain, and some insect pollinators to move the pollen across the flower to pollinate it. If the plants are covered, the wind and bees can’t do their part.

I was amazed to see the plants’ leaves waving in the wind, a wind I couldn’t even feel.

Pistils and stamens. Remember them?

The strawberry flower is not your typical flower. Yes, it has the male parts which are the yellow pollen coated anthers known as stamens. And it has the female part called an ovule that connects to an ovary and collectively is known as the pistil. However, whereas most flowers only have one pistil, the strawberry is an aggregate fruit and, as such, has as many as 500 spike-like ovules, each one an immature egg needing to be pollinated so it can produce seed. The more of those ovules that get pollinated, the bigger, puffier, and more perfect the strawberry.

The Recipe!
Yield: 4 cups of jam

8 cups (2 quarts) strawberries, stems removed and berries quartered
4 cups granulated sugar
¼ cup lemon juice or balsamic vinegar
4 bushy sprigs fresh rosemary (1/2 ounce).

Clean and hull two quarts of strawberries. Figure on four cups of berries in each quart container.

Slice berries into lengthwise quarters.

Add strawberries and sugar to a mixing bowl, stir and allow to macerate, which means to break down and soften.

Allow berries to macerate for two hours, or up to 24 hours, stirring regularly to re-incorporate the sugar that sinks to the bottom of the bowl into the mixture. Don’t skip this step. It’s what helps the berry chunks keep their shape.

Squeeze the juice out from one large lemon and set aside.

Pour the macerated strawberries and the lemon juice into a large saucepan. Bring to a rolling boil over high heat. Be careful not to let the juice boil over.

Once the mixture reaches a full boil, reduce the heat and continue cooking, uncovered, for ten minutes. About five minutes into the cooking time, add the rosemary sprigs to the pot, stir, and continue to cook.

Cooking the berries and sugar together helps release the naturally occurring pectin from the strawberries. Pectin is a gum-like substance that is needed to “set” jams and jellies. It occurs naturally in fruits, but more can be added in the form of powder if a faster set is desired. Adding an acid, such as lemon juice or vinegar, helps fruit release its natural pectin. For more on pectin, read my post about making grape jelly.

Now it is time to roast the berries.
Preheat oven to 150º. If your oven’s lowest temperature setting is a little higher than that, that is fine. You could even set the oven to convection roast and cook it in half the time, but I prefer the slow cook method.

Pour the mixture, including the rosemary, into a  13″ by 18″ baking pan. Place pan on the middle oven shelf and roast for 10 hours, or until the syrup is thickened and has a gel-like appearance. I often put it in the oven at bedtime and take it out the next morning.

How to test hot jelly for gel formation: Use a chilled wooden spoon to scoop up some jam. Allow jam to cool and then tilt the spoon so jam drips off. If the drips form a triangle-shaped thick flake, it is ready. Don’t get too hung up here with the testing. After 10 hours, assume it is going to be great!

Ladle into four 8-ounce hot, clean jars using a large-holed funnel and either

1. Process in a water bath for 10 minutes, using the appropriate two-part jar caps, aka “canning,” or
2. Cover with lids, let cool, and store in the refrigerator until ready to use, or
3. Freeze in plastic containers.

I love the combination of strawberries, a little sugar, and balsamic vinegar, so I often substitute four tablespoons of balsamic vinegar for the lemon juice. The balsamic vinegar not only flavors the jam, but it also gives it a smoother, earthier taste than the lemon juice. Having said that, my kids prefer the lemon juice version.

I love this jam spooned over @judyschickens granola and served with plain, low-fat kefir.

About The Nashville Food Project

The Nashville Food Project brings people together to grow, cook and share nourishing food, with the goals of cultivating community and alleviating hunger in our city. Their primary fundraising event, Nourish, will take place on July 28th this year instead of in June. The Patron’s Party for this event is at the legendary Bluebird Cafe and will take place on July 13th. Tickets go on sale May 20th.

© 2016 Judy Wright. All rights reserved.

Sharing the Abundance of Our City

Did you know that 40% of all the food in our city gets thrown away? For the average Nashville family, that’s 20 pounds of food waste per month and $1,500 of food thrown away each year.

But The Nashville Food Project is working to change that. Earlier this year, we became a lead agency partner in the National Resources Defense Council’s Nashville Food Waste Initiative. As part of this initiative to greatly reduce Nashville’s food waste, we’ve ramped up efforts to recover healthy surplus food from local farms, grocers and restaurants. This food is used in our meals to feed our city’s most vulnerable communities while greatly reducing the amount of food that enters our city’s waste stream. Already this year, we’ve recovered more than 20,000 pounds of food!

Our largest food donation this year - 11,000 pounds of meat recovered from a meat conference at Gaylord Opryland

This increase in donated food has allowed our staff and volunteers to work more creatively to produce our meals. As the amount of food coming in has skyrocketed, we’ve learned to really think on the fly, adapting menus for the food we’ve received and supplementing with gleaned food whenever possible. Here are a few examples of the fun menus we’ve put together recently using donated food:

• Southwest Chicken Salad sandwiches using chicken gleaned from Chipotle
• Hummus and veggie wraps using ingredients entirely gleaned from Whole Foods in Green Hills
• Chocolate bars topped with cream cheese frosting and strawberries using gleaned chess pie, gleaned cream cheese and sour cream from Iron Fork, Strawberries gleaned from Creation Gardens
• Breakfast Potato Fritatas using potatoes gleaned from Mitchell's Deli
• French Toast Sticks using items gleaned from Sinema
• Beef Stroganoff using Prime Rib gleaned from The Green Hills Grill

Increasing our food rescue efforts has also strengthened our community partnerships. We’ve added many new food donors and increased our work with several existing donors including Whole Foods Market, with whom we now glean three times each week at their Green Hills and Franklin locations. We’ve also strengthened our nonprofit partnerships as any food that we can’t use in our meals is shared with a nonprofit partner, ensuring all food goes to someone who is hungry rather than into a dumpster.

The great increase we’ve seen in donated food, has had a big impact on our meals program - decreasing food costs and increasing the amount of food we can share. Already this year, we’ve more than doubled our weekly meals production. To make this all happen, we’ve increased our meals team by two:

Booth Jewett
Food Donations Coordinator

Booth moved to Nashville in 2012 to attend Trevecca Nazarene University, where he earned a degree in Social Justice. He also received his Permaculture Design Certification (PDC) from the University of Vermont in 2015. He is a committed and passionate worker in the local food movement with experience in sustainable farming, community engagement, and speaking and teaching on food justice issues. Booth was born in Atlanta,GA and is an avid fan of all Atlanta sports teams. He and his wife Brittany live in South Nashville.

Christa Ross
Meals Manager - South Hall

A Nashville native, Christa received a degree in environmental policy from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She headed west after school and spent five years in Oregon and Northern California working on several organic farms and in catering -- developing a deep seeded love for food.  After moving back to Nashville, Christa joined the staff of TNFP as Food Rescue Coordinator before moving into her current role of Meals Manager - South Hall. Outside of work, Christa spends as much time as possible outside, hiking, kayaking and growing good food!

For more information or to donate food, please contact Food Donations Coordinator Booth Jewett at booth@thenashvillefoodproject.org.

Refugee Growers Prepare for Nashville Farmers Market Season

We're so excited to continue our support of the Center for Refugees and Immigrants of Tennessee's Refugee Agricultural Program this growing season! This year, we have an exciting new aspect of the program, which will support a number of growers as they work to sell some of the produce that they grow. Below is a post from our partner CRIT on the progress thus far.

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The farmers of the Refugee Agricultural Program of Middle Tennessee arrived early Monday morning at the Nashville Farmers’ Market to imagine their new space under the Farm Sheds.

Beginning in May, they’ll be selling the produce they have been working hard to grow off Haywood Lane in South Nashville to the thousands of customers who browse the downtown market on Saturdays.

“This is the first time this has ever happened at the Nashville Farmers’ Market,” said Tasha Kennard, the executive director of the market who spoke with the group. “You can inspire the community and teach the community that you want to be a part of it and inspire others to do what you’re doing.”

Many in the group have grown food or worked farmers markets in their native countries of Bhutan, Nepal and Burma. Here, they’ll join a group of about 150 merchants at the market from Tennessee and nearby states like Kentucky and Alabama.

Tasha offered tips to the group through translator Siddi Rimal about how to successfully sell at the market, but she also congratulated the group on opening doors and showing community members how to provide food, create jobs and support families.

“We are here to support you,” she said, “and our fellow farmers are here to support you and help you have a good time.”

We hope you’ll visit our farmers’ market booth on Saturdays from May through September. The Nashville Farmers’ Market is located at 900 Rosa L Parks Blvd.

Guest Chef Series: Hattie B's Hot Chicken

When we invite professionals to our kitchens each month for the Guest Chef Series, it often feels like a family affair with husband and wife teams or kitchen crews generously taking a break from their regular days to prepare a meal in our space. But it has never felt quite like the family reunion as when the clan of Hattie B's Hot Chicken pitched in to help. 

Executive Chef John Lasater and his wife Brittany Bishop Lasater arrived first to get started. The TNFP meals team had left them notes and a recipe to work from based on produce that had been gathered from the garden that week and donations gleaned from other farmers or partners like Whole Foods Market. 

They pulled ingredients from the walk-in cooler labeled for the day and destination... 

...and John headed for the greenhouse to clip fresh herbs.

Back in the kitchen, Brittany began mixing the cornbread while John put the beans on to soak with aromatics alongside pans of sizzling sausage donated from KLD Farm. Even with their busy schedules, the couple keeps a garden of their own and has been renovating their East Nashville home kitchen. "We do enjoy cooking at home from time to time," Brittany says.  

Both John and Brittany grew up in Middle Tennessee and attended Western Kentucky University. Then Brittany left for art school and John left for culinary school and work in New York City. They didn't officially meet until both moved back to Nashville and joined a kickball league. 

"I've always enjoyed cooking," John says of his path in the business. "My mom started us cooking and would give me my budget for three course meals -- an appetizer, entree and dessert." 

His aunt and grandmother also ran a catering company called An Affair to Remember cooking for the likes of Alan Jackson and George Strait. "Whenever family got together, the meal consisted of four meals, like 10 sides...food was always the focal point." 

John says he loved working in New York City, too, at restaurants like Gramercy Tavern. But like others in the city, he had trouble affording the Big Apple on a chef's starting salary. He moved to Nashville and took a job at The Hermitage Hotel's Capitol Grille with Executive Chef Tyler Brown as well as friends Chris Carter and James Peisker, who went on to open Porter Road Butcher. 

But of the career twists and turns, perhaps his biggest test came when cooking for Brittany's family. Her father, Nick Sr., has been in the restaurant business for 30 years.

"He made pimento cheese au gratin potatoes," Brittany says of a birthday dinner John cooked for her dad. "They were gone in lightening speed -- like, it evaporated." 

Right on cue, Nick Sr. arrived at TNFP to help finish the meal. His son, business partner and Brittany's brother, Nick Jr., arrived too.

From left: John Lasater, Brittany Bishop Lasater, Nick Bishop Jr., and Nick Bishop Sr.

Nick Sr. grew up in the Morrison's Cafeteria family of restaurants. His father started in the business as a dishwasher in Savannah in the 1940s and retired as President and CEO of Morrison's. The group also bought Ruby Tuesday and grew the chain to 900 stores before selling it. Then, after Nick Sr. "retired" and opened Bishop's Meat and Three in Cool Springs, both Nicks began experimenting with hot chicken. The dish took off as a favorite, and they decided to open Hattie B's Hot Chicken with John stepping in as a consultant just for three to six months initially. Now about four years later, John still works with the company, and his pimento cheese gratin from that fateful family dinner made its way to the menu as pimento mac and cheese along with many other popular dishes. 

Back in the TNFP kitchen, Nick Sr., with his natural restaurant instincts, checked the Delvin Farms sweet potatoes roasting in the TNFP ovens before they headed for John Glenn residential center, and John finished the main course by layering white beans with sausage and TNFP-grown kale. 

"I like the idea of using what you have on hand," John said.

"I want to do it again," Brittany added. 

And maybe they'll bring even more family next time? 

"I don't think you have a kitchen big enough," John teased, "for what we could bring." 

A Day in a Dozen: Our First Day at St. Luke's in 12 Photos

Today's "Day in a Dozen" features a new, very exciting partnership with St. Luke's Community House.

Last week we launched a new partnership with St. Luke's Community House in West Nashville, serving 1,330 meals each week for St. Luke's preschool and mobile meals programs. St. Luke's Community House has been meeting the needs of families in The Nations community for more than 100 years. St. Luke's is a United Way Family Resource Center, providing a comprehensive list of programs and services for children and youth, adults, seniors, and families as a whole. As part of this new partnership, The Nashville Food Project has taken over St. Luke's large commercial kitchen, giving TNFP a second kitchen from which we can produce even more meals to feed our city and bring communities together.

We began serving meals at St. Luke's on Monday, March 28. Longtime TNFP volunteer cook Ann Fundis, who is helping to launch the partnership as Kitchen Manager, arrived bright and early at 6:30 AM to begin prepping breakfast for the preschool and getting the kitchen ready for the day ahead.

Here's Ann Fundis checking inventory of a donation of healthy snack packs.

Here are our meal counts for all of our St. Luke's meals.

We're in organizational heaven over here!

By 8:00 AM, Ann was joined by TNFP staffer Sarah Morgan who began serving breakfast in the preschool classrooms. Monday morning's breakfast was sausage biscuits with orange juice. 

At 8:30 AM, the staff, joined by St. Luke's interim cook Mike, began prepping and cooking lunches for St. Luke's mobile meals program and the preschool. At 9:45 AM, volunteers Debbie Willis and Shellye Geske arrived to begin plating mobile meals lunches. The delicious lunch of baked ziti with meatballs, carrot and raisin salad and orange slices fed both the seniors receiving mobile meals and the preschoolers. 

At 10:15 AM, St. Luke's mobile meals volunteers arrived to pack up the lunches and begin deliveries to seniors throughout the community. We loved sharing with these volunteers a bit about TNFP and learning more about why they give their time to this vital program at St. Luke's.

By 10:30 AM, all of the mobile meals were out for delivery, and our volunteers had some time to begin prepping for afternoon snacks for the preschool and other meals later in the week. Here's Shellye and Debbie prepping kale from our gardens for Thursday's meals.

At 11:00 AM, we begin serving lunches to the preschool classrooms. At this point, we've already served 200 meals, and it's not even noon yet!

Here's Sarah loading up a cart to deliver meals to classrooms. 

And here she is setting up lunch in one of the preschool classrooms. There, the teachers will portion the food out and serve the kids this yummy lunch.

Once lunch is served, we clean up before the staff take a much-needed break. Then at 1:00, we begin prep for the last meal of the day - snacks! Today, the preschoolers are getting some of those healthy snack packs of cheese and crackers Ann prepped earlier along with some apples that Sarah slices before serving at 2:00 PM. Once snacks are served, the staff preps meals for the following day before cleaning up and heading home at 3:30 PM.

And that's a wrap! In our first day at St. Luke's we served 260 meals! We are so excited for this new partnership and how it will help us grow our reach in this community. We're honored to partner with an organization with a long history in the city of Nashville, and we can't wait to see all that this partnership will hold for the future of TNFP. For more information on this partnership, please contact us at info@thenashvillefoodproject.org. Be on the lookout for volunteer opportunities to open up shortly!

Unique New Meal with Friends

This February, TNFP began providing lunches to Friend’s Life Community, a nonprofit that empowers adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, their Friends, to live as independently as possible as they age out of other support services. Their mission is to create opportunities for teenagers and adults with disabilities to develop socially, grow personally, and enjoy community as they experience life together.

TNFP’s first question for any new, prospective meal partnership is “how can food support what’s going on in your community?” For Friend’s Life, this question had a unique answer.

 A big part of Friend’s Life programming is to get Friends out in the community to practice daily life skills. When the Friends were going out together to restaurants, the staff saw that ordering food was a big challenge. They had an idea to set up a simulation in their own facility that would allow the Friends to practice social and money math skills.

“We wanted to set up the cafe because we saw some deficits and places that we could grow our social skills and grow our manners. This simulation is giving them the chance to practice that here before we take it back out in the community and see how we learned,” said Jenna Sutter Brown.

 “We’re taking things step by step,” she adds. 

At first, Friends were asked to choose between two entree options for lunch at the cafe they set up in their facility. Now, the Friends are placing their order from a menu with a cashier. Friends line up and order one at a time, and then pick up their food from “the kitchen.” The next learning objective Friend’s Life staff plan to implement is to simulate payment by pre-loading debit cards for Friends to use at the counter. Eventually, they hope to help each Friend develop “go-to” orders for several restaurants in town, even making cards with pictures of food for those Friends with limited verbal skills.

TNFP’s relationship with Friend’s Life began with the Friends volunteering in our gardens. “Not being able to see the reward right away is tough…Now we have the connection between all the work to what actually ends up on their plate. It brings it full circle for them,” Jenna tells us. Much of the produce the Friends help grow in TNFP's gardens end up in their meals. 

Health concerns can be a challenge for those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, so encouraging nutrient-dense foods is a priority at Friend’s Life. Staff have long emphasized healthy choices, but since Friends would bring their food from home they weren’t able to introduce new foods.

Jenna explains, “This gives us a little bit of control, knowing that (TNFP) is going to provide us with something that is filled with colorful, rich, vitamin-filled good food. That gives us peace of mind. We’re seeing that if we give them the option, they’re willing to try new things and actually like it.”

The ability to provide a nutritious meal is part of our mission, but knowing that Friends Life takes it further within their community by linking the meal to skill development is immensely gratifying.

Holy Canola Oil!

If you haven't met loyal TNFP volunteer and board member Judy Wright, then you are missing out! Judy cooks regularly in our kitchen and she shares with us so many great recipes (Judy's Mom's Meatloaf, anyone?) and tips for the kitchen and garden. Judy regularly shares her impressive knowledge through her blog at JudysChickens.org, and periodically we'll be sharing some of those posts. Today we've got a great post on how canola oil is made, featuring one of TNFP's newest food donation partners Solio.

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Last April, I wrote a story about the gorgeous yellow fields of canola that were growing along I-24 in Cadiz, Kentucky. You can read all about it and see the photos here.

This is Part 2 of that story. The part where after seeing a dramatic increase in the number of yellow fields from the year before, I called the plant manager at the AgStrong Canola and Sunflower Seed Processing Plant in Trenton, Kentucky and asked, What gives? Why are we suddenly seeing yellow everywhere? When he started to explain, I realized I had a lot to learn and asked if I could drive over to meet him and get a tour of the plant. An hour later Mark Dallas was giving my husband and me a tour. Not exactly the way I thought my day would turn out, but I do love a good backroads detour.

As background information, can-o-l-a oil, or “Canada-oil-low-acid,” is made from crushed canola seeds. These seeds are about the size of poppy seeds. Even having seen how canola oil is extracted from the seeds, I still shake my head in disbelief that anything that small could produce so much of something as useful as cooking oil.

A very short botany lesson about plant reproduction:
Flowers have one job, and one job only: to induce reproduction. To that end, flowers that are fertilized will make seeds. Those seeds will make new plants. That the plants grow and produce tasty fruits, vegetables, and kitchen staples like canola oil, is bonus. Those fruits of the plants are just ripened ovaries full of seeds. Their flesh is sweet so animals will eat them and disperse the seeds in their travels. Tree nuts work in the same way; Mother Nature is counting on squirrels to bury the nuts and thereby assure there will be more trees in the future.

Back to canola flowers and seeds. Like winter wheat, canola is planted in the fall, sprouts then go dormant in the winter and perk up again in early spring. It flowers in mid-April, and the seed pods are harvested in mid-June. Farmers like to grow winter wheat and canola because then they can double-crop their fields, meaning there is time left in the warm months to raise another crop, such as soybeans, in that same field. By comparison, in most northern climates, there’s only time to grow one crop like wheat or canola.

The photo on the left was taken from a stem of canola flowers on April 17th. The photo on the right was taken on June 12th, just a few days before the pods were harvested by the combines I wrote about in this article.

You may have seen similar seed pods develop in your own gardens if you ever let broccoli or bok choi plants flower and “go to seed.” If you look closely at the flowers below, you can see the early development of seed pods. They look like little spikes. Canola is in the same Brassica family as bok choi and broccoli.

The next photos are of fully mature canola seed pods that I dissected at home to release the seeds within. You can see how small these seeds are. It’s amazing to think cooking oil is extracted from them.

AgStrong contracts with local, family-owned, farms to plant nonGMO canola seeds in their fields. NonGMO means the seed’s genetic material has not been manipulated in a laboratory through genetic engineering to make it more disease or insect resistant.  A few other tidbits I learned about growing canola: canola has a 5-6 inch tap route which acts as a natural tiller in the soil, and canola brings in $8.10/bushel compared to wheat’s $5.25/bushel.

Here is a photo of the canola oil processing plant in Trenton, KY.

It takes a lot of seeds to make canola oil and these fifty-foot silos are full of them.

This is what the inside of one of those silos looks like.

The first stop on the tour was the long silver cylindrical oven used to warm the seeds to no more than 120º. Warming the seeds made them easier to press. The low oven temperature kept the process in the category of cold-pressed. The blue conveyor belt brought the warmed seeds to a machine that cracked the hard outer shells.

Next stop was the seed crusher. This was where the magic happened. This machine crushed the seeds and expelled the golden canola oil into the blue well. The oil will still need to go to an offsite refinery before it can be bottled.

Here was the residual seed meal as it dropped onto a conveyor belt.

This meal was delivered to the green machine for a second pressing to remove the last traces of oil. At this plant, there are no chemical solvents, like hexane, used to extract these last drops of oil. That’s where the expression “all natural expeller press” comes from.

Here’s the residual meal as it came off the conveyor belt after the last of the oil had been pressed from it. The meal is used to feed livestock.

This is the transport room. It’s where the seeds, collected from farmers, are gathered and delivered to the silos for storage. And later, after pressing, where the extracted oil is weighed and distributed, via trucks, to be delivered to Georgia for the final refining process and …

bottling. You can find Agstrong’s Solio Canola Oil at Whole Foods stores.

But the story doesn’t end there. As a volunteer chef and Board member of  The Nashville Food Project my antennae is always up for opportunities for food donation and food recovery. Canola and olive oil are two expensive staples we use in abundance at TNFP.  I asked if Agstrong would consider partnering with us and donating their locally grown and manufactured Solio oil to TNFP, which they have graciously done. Here was the Plant Manger, Mark Dallas, donating a 35-pound container of oil to TNFP, on the spot.

And that’s how this one little detour ended up providing cooking oil for TNFP whose mission is “Bringing people together to grow, cook, and share nourishing food with the goals of cultivating community and alleviating hunger in our city.”

The story, however, didn’t end there, either. I happened to “pull” a few young canola plants from the side of the road last April to plant in my vegetable garden, so I could watch and learn how these plants matured to the seed stage. Once the plants produced seed pods and dried out, I was pleasantly surprised to walk out to my garden one day and see my chickens poking their heads through the chicken wire and eating the canola seeds.

Looks like Agstrong’s byproduct of meal for livestock was a winner.

Thanks to Mark for the tour and to Mike McAdaragh, Agstrong’s Crop Development Specialist, for personally delivering canola oil to The Nashville Food Project.

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Reblogged from JudysChickens.org © 2016 Judy Wright. All rights reserved.

Guest Chef Series: Owen Clark of Rolf and Daughters

Chef Owen Clark of Rolf and Daughters working in The Nashville Food Project kitchens. Photo by Danielle Atkins. 

Owen Clark came to Rolf and Daughters as Chef de Cuisine a year and a half ago after a cross-country road trip led him through Music City.  The Colorado native had been working in New York City for the past several years and wanted a change.

These days, he's certainly found it. He can go two-stepping when he wants. He bought a kayak. He even started tooling leather, a hobby that’s more related to his profession than might initially appear.

“Growing up with horses on a horse ranch and being around that as a functional art form is a lot of what speaks to me about cooking,” he says.  “It has to be functional. But it also has to be exciting and delicious and appealing. And I think leather is the same thing. You’re working with your hands, so you get to zone-out and focus and make something that’s really beautiful. But if it doesn’t fit, it’s pretty useless.”

Attention to function and flavor might be part of why he rocked it as part of our Guest Chef Series at TNFP. When he visited with his girlfriend and photographer Danielle Atkins to make a meal during one of the volunteer cook shifts, he transformed donated, garden-grown and gleaned ingredients into a dish of chicken, sweet potatoes, apples and curry. He spotted the greenhouse out back and clipped parsley and leaves from a lime tree. “That’s one of things that inspired me to change up what I thought I was going to make when I looked at the ingredients available,” he said.

Owen in TNFP's greenhouse. Photo by Danielle Atkins.

With the leaves, he made a lime, garlic, balsamic and soy vinaigrette for charred broccoli.

For wilted curly kale salad he added the chopped flat-leaf Italian parsley with the stalks folded in, too, that were large enough to be “like their own vegetable.”

Using all parts of the parsley from the garden helps demonstrate Owen's commitment to not wasting food.

“Every day I’m trying to find ways to use everything,” he says. “From a business standpoint it’s like, ‘Okay, that’s money in the garbage,’ and that’s one way to look at it. But also it’s heartbreaking to see something go in the trash. The more you know about farming and what you can do with certain things, the more you see it as a wasted opportunity and wasted work. So many hours and heart and hard-ass work went into taking this from dirt to product to what could be food. Along the way if you haven’t done your best to make it something better then you’re really doing a disservice.”

Also from a professional standpoint, Owen said he has spent much of his time hidden in a kitchen and cooking for a more exclusive clientele at places like wd-50, A Voce and Blue Hill in New York as well as Rolf and Daughters.  Stepping out to cook at The Nashville Food Project gave him an opportunity to use his skills and talents for a different audience of about 70 low-income residents at John Glenn retirement home.

“It gets to a point where you want to make food for the people who need it in a way that’s still delicious and good for you,” he says. “And it’s nourishing for your soul to do that as well.  That’s what I’ve been looking to do in some facet."

“That’s one of the reasons The Nashville Food Project appealed to me the most. I want to do that and feel good about what I’m making for the people who need it.”

Owen handing off his meal to the truck delivery team. Photo by Danielle Atkins. 

The Seed is in the Ground

Good morning, friends!

Those of you who have spent some time at The Nashville Food Project know there are a lot of moving parts to our programs. Navigating the year-over-year growth of our organization and the day-to-day operations takes both planning and improvisation. 

I was recently introduced to an internal food project document maintained by our indomitable meals team - The Meals Worksheet. This is a planning spreadsheet shared between six people with columns for rescued food coming in, menus going out, hiccups during volunteer meal prep, last minute ingredient switches, and the like. Here is a snapshot of what this document looks like in action:

Likewise, our garden team keeps a massive spreadsheet of plans for the various gardens we steward across the city, with columns for seed variety, greenhouse start dates for succession planting, row feet per crop, numbers related to yield, and more. Our garden team manages to this document with an impressive level of geeked-out detail. Here's a look:

These are just a couple of the tools we use daily to help us plan, communicate, and document the many changes that affect our work flow, our programming, and the good food going out into the community. 

When you're growing, cooking, and sharing food for and with the masses, it's essential to make plans. Of course, our growing edge is not learning how to plan better, it's how to let go of the plan when a Pyrex measuring cup shatters into the tomato sauce 20 minutes before meal service or a group of volunteers pulls the strawberry plants from a garden bed instead of pulling the weeds. It seems like life’s best lessons are usually learned when things don’t go as planned.

I'm in awe of our devoted staff who keep well-managed plans and yet stay flexible to the inevitable curve ball, whether it's a bushel of fresh quince to be incorporated into a meal or a hailstorm in March. This work reminds us that we can usher our plans only so far before we must let go of the reins. Or as the poet Wendell Berry, who is so-often quoted in my columns, reminds us: 

“The seed is in the ground.
Now may we rest in hope,
while darkness does its work.”

— Wendell Berry

Grace and peace, 

Meatopia is a Wrap!

by Food Rescue Coordinator Christa Ross

I am generally amazed at the amount of time it takes to put out just one of our many meals.  Of course there’s the prep time, the cook time, the drive time, and all of the logistics.  All of these things, in themselves, take time, planning, and implementation.  

But upwards and above all of these basic things that make up a meal, our mission incorporates the use of rescued and donated food as a central ingredient.   Keeping down costs means more, high quality meals going out to our communities. It also means less food waste heading to the landfill.  I love this idea -- in the midst of our societies abundance, as we are surrounded, out of sight, by the hungry and under represented, all food should play a part in feeding our community.

Last week we had one of our largest gleaning opportunities of the year -- a meat conference at the Gaylord Opryland Convention Center -- an event we have fondly been referring to as “MEATOPIA”.  We rescued a grand total of 11,000 lbs of meat from this event -- what will be used for many months to feed our community.  What an amazing gift.

The planning for this event included many meetings and emails, volunteer wrangling, one of the most intricate colored duct-tape inventory systems I’ve ever seen, and a truck load of wax boxes.  We also pulled together 5 trucks for hauling the meat and ended up filling two walk in freezers (stacks of boxes everywhere) and three pallets full stored in a warehouse freezer.

The evening starts with a massive room full of displays like this one. We send teams around the room collecting all of the meat and bringing it back to our staging area to be sorted and transported to our kitchen.

Here's where the duct-tape comes in. All of the meat gets sorted - chicken with chicken, beef with beef, bacon with bacon (and there's a LOT of bacon) - and then loaded up in our refrigerated truck and other volunteer vehicles to be taken back to our kitche.

We are forever grateful to all of the donors at the convention, to Gaylord Opryland for letting us use their loading dock, to Nashville Grown for his wonderful refrigerated truck, and to Triumph and all other volunteers, without whom we could never have pulled it off.  You all are amazing!  

Just a few hours earlier, this room was full of meat. Thank you to the convention and Gaylord Opryland for allowing us to recover all of this great food for our meals!