Crossroads Community Services hosts a meal service every Sunday, Monday and Wednesday mornings. They also have a food pantry and a womens shelter. Today we cooked a hot, delicious, nutritious meal for over 200 people. Id like to expand on that general description of what we do. Ive worked at a lot of soup kitchens. Some of them use rescued food that restaurants had cooked too much of. Some kitchens cook their meals, but due to their budget, manpower or many other factors they worry more about quantity over quality and theres nothing wrong with that. Any food is good food when youre starving. Ive been cooking for crossroads for 3 or 4 four weeks now and I never fail to be impressed at how much care goes into the preparation. Yeah, we are a little limited by time, but the chef encourages us to overcome that with imagination. Today, for example. We had two people making pasta, two people making a tuna dish to serve over the pasta, two people making couscous, and little old me making the green salad, and the dressing to go with it. We had a few rescue salads from the restaurant that were just iceberg lettuce, shredded carrots and some cherry tomatoes. Thats not good enough for us. Were told to cook like were cooking for our families. So I used that salad as a base, then I added some fresh greens, baby spinach, cilantro, black olives, sweet corn, blueberries, strawberries, garbanzo beans, carrots, cheddar and swiss cheeses. Then I made a red wine vinaigrette to dress it with. This was just the salad! You should have seen what everyone else did with their dishes. Then the food is served to our guests as if they were in a restaurant. More than once weve been thanked by our guests for treating them like normal people. If youd like to get involved with Crossroads you can volunteer directly at crossroadsnyc.org or through New York Cares at newyorkcares.org.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 13:18:16 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015