Hunger In America (Pt. II)

When E and I were moving this past summer, cleaning out the kitchen in itself took a whole day (and that’s just an apartment-sized kitchen) and the frustration didn’t just end with packing pots, pans, and dishes. The fact that we were throwing away TONS of food from our cabinets. Food that wasn’t just mine, but some leftover from roommates, visitors who came on through, parents and friends who thought you could use a lil extra something…

It hurt enough to see all that stuff go in the trash, and there had to be a better solution. And thus, we ended up putting all we could into a bag and donated it to our nearest Food Bank NYC.

Interested? These were the guidelines we were told:

• Pile up whatever non-perishables you have that’s not expired. Yep, it’s called shelf-life for a reason! But if it’s not that far from the date, you can give it a shot to see if they’ll still need it.
• Find the location nearest to you and call ahead to see if someone would be there to collect. The lady in charge was on vacation, but luckily someone else was there to help. Not everyone’s protocol might be the same, and since it was in the dead of July’s major heatwave, we needed to be sure there was a definite point B from walking at our point A . The Food Bank actually ended up being in a church a few blocks away from our apartment and unmarked (no sign except inside the church).
• Our site had some preferences to what food was to be donated (based on necessity) but in case you ever find you have any questions here’s a list I found of some suggested food items for giving.
• Also, don’t always expect a receipt. Honestly, we weren’t concerned with a tax deduction that so much as our need to find a place for this food, the fulfillment of knowing it wouldn’t be wasted, and the reassurance of knowing that someone else could benefit from this situation more than us.

And I hope that someone did.

Hunger In America

(thanks Jeannie for the article!)

Food writer and one of my personal aspirations, Mark Bittman (a cook, writer, and lover of food, and another cool not-a-chef like most of us) posted an article regarding the hunger crisis in America entitled: ‘I Eat and Mom Doesn’t: Growing Up Hungry in America’.  

Try to take a look at it when you get a moment. It’s a reflection upon the poverty hunger epidemic in America, which is increased much in the last few years. Where lucky folks like us are fortunate to have plenty of food in our lives to taste, cook, and blog about for our own adventures, there are plenty others in America alone who barely have enough to get through a month. Just another grain of being grateful added to the sandglass, for sure.

I remember when I was beginning a classroom assistant job in the city around the time I was about 23, a few of us who were just hired bonded together about just how bad the job was, went off for lunch together, and would of course get on the train after work was done for the day and go off once again how the day was. Most of all, it was payday that was the worst, due to the mere fact that they were so disorganized they couldn’t pay us on time. At the time, I didn’t look at it as a big deal so much as an annoyance, but one of my co-workers did.

One day in the usual walk to the station with one of my fellow assistants, she was more fired up than usual. Of course, payday came and went and we were told of a delay on all our checks. We decided to take a little longer walk to the next subway stop so she could calm down, and basically she broke down and told me how she’d been feeding her kids ramen noodles for days until she was supposed to get paid. With every delay (and it was a few days), and in-between all the expenses from doctors’ appointments to doing laundry as a single mom, pretty much she had no idea where the kids’ next meal was going to come from. I’ll admit, at the time I looked at her and was a bit skeptical .. she was employed after all and always seemed to hold a good amount of confidence. But here she was, telling me flat-out that she didn’t have enough to put food on the table for her family, and if they kept up with these delays, she wasn’t sure what she was going to do.

The end of the story has me offering her $10-dollars, her thanking me profusely and promising to pay me back, but I’d decided to leave that job the following week so I never got it back. Did I really care or did I know for sure if she was feeding her kids with that $10? I’ll never know. But if it was $10 for my own food for thought at that time, I could deal with that.

Prezzies

Well, it’s that time. A milestone in the year of the life, and this time, it’s for E 🙂

My fiance’ will be turning 30 this upcoming weekend, and although a new decade in the life may be met with some moaning and groaning for some, I plan to make this as smooth a transition as possible.

Case in point, the perfect present I found would have to be something he ultimately wanted. Unfortunately since Aerosmith is nowhere near us and the surprise party has already been done before, I rooted around and finally decided to give him what he wanted: a skydiving lesson and a really good seafood meal.

So now that the skydiving lesson was taken care of (booked for a Sunday not too far from now!) there was deciding on a dish to make. Now of course, this of course is thrown with a little bit more of a selfish intention: I more so want to have fun making something just as much as he will get to reap the benefits of eating it! And since of course in the pro-spousal support he always offers of saying he likes anything I make, well, that wasn’t gonna cut it this time.

And so, after digging around a bit and toying with some ideas, the challenge has been set and the excitement begins! I decided a One-Pot Clambake would be the perfect offering for all of E’s tastes – sausage, potatoes, corn, spices, but most of all, mussels, clams, and LOBSTER!!! (I have yet to make my first lobster, and yep, now the moment has come) Perhaps it’s because I was never the biggest lobster person, but the moment finally seems appropriate.

The new multi-cooker’s waitin’ to be christened and hodge-podge’d. L’Chaim.