We've discovered a delicious way to prepare both almond and lemon cookies from a yellow cake mix. Thank you Anne Byrn AKA "The Cake Mix Doctor" for sharing your excess cake mixes with us!
Last summer, students from the Oasis Center worked in partnership with The Frist Center to make this beautiful art installation that hangs over the refugee toolshed at our Wedgewood Urban Gardens. Some of the students continue to volunteer weekly in the garden and are proud to show their artwork to their peers from the International Teen Outreach Program.
Here's the best turkey pickin' group in Nashville! Almost 100 pounds of turkeys & chickens were turned into pot pies made with a a rich, homemade broth and lots of fresh vegetables. Our office smelled like grandma's house for days!
Thanks to these ladies for contributing their artwork to the McGruder Community Garden. This space is now truly full of life in many senses of the word!
Thanks to these students from Glencliff High School for volunteering in the garden. They worked hard to dig a new plot in the orchard, and the community gardeners have since planted it with potatoes!
After planting spring crops and working together to get seed potatoes in the ground, the McGruder Green Thumbers gathered around picnic tables to relax and enjoy a delicious lunch.
Thanks to the Herb Society of Nashville for donating herbs left over from their annual plant sale! We were able to share these herbs with the community gardeners we support at McGruder FRC, Wedgewood Urban Gardens and the Refugee Agriculture Program. For more about the herb society, visit their website here: http://www.herbsocietynashville.org
This guy! Continued thanks to John Patrick of Foggy Hollow Farm who dropped off 30 dozen certified organic eggs for us to use in our meals. John is building a sustainable poultry network in our community and his enthusiasm for chickens is contagious! You can purchase his eggs, meat and chickens. Learn more at foggyhollowfarm.net
We love our partnership with Ensworth's 3rd grade classes. They purchase our seedlings through Project Grow, we help them plant their raised beds, and they donate the produce they harvest back to our kitchens. A pretty sweet deal on our end! We like to think they're gaining something as well: gardening skills and a fun, tangible way to give back to their community.
Feeling a little slouch after a long winter hibernation? Nothing gets the blood flowing like turning compost at our gardens. Come by anytime to see what's cooking in our compost pile!
We received many generous donations of sweet potatoes this winter from Delvin Farms and enjoyed making this special main course dish served at many of our meal locations.
This candid photo captures two friends from Glencliff's International Teen Outreach Program as they hand off a bucket of seed potatoes. We truly love having these students in our garden--they bring so much joy and positivity with them every single time.
You've gotta love spring when this is what 6pm looks like in the garden!
Several weeks ago, The Nashville Food Project got a call from an event coordinator at Opryland Gaylord asking whether we could receive a large donation of fresh meat (never been frozen) at the conclusion of the American Meat Convention. We were told the take would be something like a thousand pounds. Over the course of a few days, we got a plan in place to recover so much meat: organized volunteers, rented freezer space, counted vehicles, and purchased wax-lined boxes to be palletized. In a caravan of trucks and station wagons, our people arrived at the convention center last Monday evening, ready to pack up thousands of pounds of meat for inclusion in our meals.
As the conference was winding down, company reps began packing up, leaving all of their meat products on display for our team to pick up. In food project aprons, we went from booth to booth, boxing up pork, chicken, beef, turkey, lamb and veal, as well as some other exotic meats, like boar, buffalo, duck and goose. These were products that would have otherwise gone into the dumpster at the end of the night. Did you all know 40% of all food in our country gets wasted? And one person in every five people in Tennessee doesn’t have enough healthy food to eat? The wasteful nature of our economy is one of our most egregious sins, especially when we remember we are talking about actual life wasted—each animal's life an important part of God's inexhaustibly beautiful creation.
The Nashville Food Project boxed up 5,100 pounds of high-quality meat that night! Based on current outputs, this should be enough meat to get us through 10 months of meals shared with people in need. I am proud of the new challenges The Nashville Food Project is able to meet, thanks to the TREMENDOUS support from our ever-widening circle of friends. If you want to get involved in this joyful, life-giving, sometimes-messy work, email us, and we will find a place for you!
