Recovery Cafe and Food Bank Growers

By Kate Nichols
Adapted by Karen King

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The Recovery Café   is a great place for a warm lunch from Tuesday to Friday, 12-2:00 pm. The lunches use many donated ingredients from local farms and the Food Bank gardens. One favorite recipe that uses a wide variety of vegetables from the gardens is the Any Vegetable Tart. (below)  It’s good one to make if you need to use some of those vegetables you aren’t quite sure what to do with.

Karen King  is the Recovery Café staff member who manages the kitchen. She works to build strong teams of volunteers for each day. Some of the volunteers are regulars, some are more ad hoc. Karen and the teams plan menus weekly, based on the donated produce from the Food Bank gardens as well as other contributions that Karen acquires from a wide variety of sources.

One kitchen volunteer and professional baker, Carol, comes in on Mondays when the café is closed. She bakes bread, cookies, cupcakes, or muffins for the week’s meals. Often, as we cook a meal, we have brainstorm how to make a recipe taste even better, like adding ginger or more salt, or garlic, something to give it more zing. All the volunteers are talented and valued.

The recipe below shows you the original recipe, which was written to serve eight people, but at the café we often serve 45 to 50 meals, so Karen has included instructions for how to increase the recipe from the original eight servings to as many as fifty.

The Café is a program of the Dove House Advocacy Services.  It is a full member of the Recovery Café Network, a nationwide model of recovery peer support. The Café welcomes anyone who is in recovery from something. Besides a meal there are Circles for members to join to get support, yoga, a monthly open mic and other community activities. Join us for a meal!

More here www.foodbankgrowers.org/recovery-cafe-and-food-bank-growers