Soup Kitchen Experiences

Getting Ready for Tuesday 

I have an amazing husband - just wonderful!  Today, he browned sixteen pounds of hamburger that I will use to make baked spaghetti for 100.  The browning is most of the work and from here, I just need to boil 10 pounds of pasta, add the 10 cans of spaghetti sauce and buy some shredded mozzarella from Costco.  This is a favorite dish at the soup kitchen for all of us.  Everyone loves to eat it, and it is simple to serve.  Tossed salad and muffins along with John’s birthday cake will make the meal.

Thanks to donations from Upper Montclair Presbyterian and others, we have great food from the Food Bank right now. 

My Buddy John

One of the most reliable diners at the soup kitchen is a man named John.  He has gray hair and missing teeth and is painfully thin.  On cold days, he comes early to help us carry in heavy pots and pans then stays in the dining room to keep warm.  He is a very kind man who is very humble and sweet.  I had guessed his age at 70 or so.  Yesterday, he told me he just had his birthday on Sunday.  He was 53 years old.  Just 53.  I’ll be that age this year.  He didn’t do anything to celebrate and seemed glad to share his birthday news with me.

We will celebrate next week with a giant sheet cake at the soup kitchen for him and all of the Jan, Feb and March birthdays.  He is such a good person.

Big Pot of Beans!!!

I had no idea how many beans twelve pounds of dried beans would produce.  ALOT!  I started with two large pots - Calphalon pasta size - and soaked the beans overnight.  I went to sleep with them covered by several inches of water and filling a bit more than half the pots.  I awoke to two overly full pots with water completely absorbed.  Cooked them in three batches then added 8 pounds of browned hamburger. Had to use my canning kettle and another pot for transport and serving.

They tasted boring, dull.  Added more salt and pepper then threw in three big cans of tomato paste and some tomato based barbecue sauce.  Now, they had a bit of punch.  Also, the meaty taste came through nicely.  We will serve them over rice alongside ham, tossed salad and muffins.  Lots of our folks won’t eat ham or pork due to religious prohibition thus the meat in the beans.

Why this weird combo?  We get food from the Community Food Bank which we prepare for the soup kitchen’s Tuesday luncheon each week.  We serve from 11 until 12 although we always continue until 12:15 or so with latecomers. We never serve soup!  It sloshes all over the place and is relatively low in food value for the weight and trouble involved.  Requires an additional bowl also.

The food we receive is not predictable. We sometimes end up with cases of fancy bar soaps and huge tubes of toothpaste.  Last week’s meal ended with individual mince tarts imported from England, and we often have cases of Easter cookies in October.  With such a odd range of food offerings we create the best entrees we can then serve the 100 or more people who arrive in the Newark church’s basement.  At least once each month, I go to Costco and buy good stuff for a meal since it is just too awful to try to concoct an entree from the pantry offerings.

I find the soup kitchen experience extraordinarily rewarding and have been able to recruit other suburban volunteers and groups as cooks and donors.  When I don’t see the locals I normally expect to see, it really worries me, and they know I look for them.  Once each month we have a birthday party with an enormous sheet cake from Costco, and every person born that month is sung to and applauded. These displaced adults don’t have anyone remember birthdays, so the tears flow as they remember how it is to feel special.   

Getting funding for a mission like this is hard since most foundations want you to be training the people or improving the earning potential of the diners.  Reality is that this is never going to happen for most of the folks we feed.  They are handicapped, addicted, old or in need of significant education.  We are the meal of last resort.  I reach out to the twenty somethings and work with them on resumes and employment strategies.  One guy has gotten a job, but the other is often drunk (or high - who knows) and doesn’t keep it together enough to make it through an interview.  Plus there is the whole phone issue - how does a prospective employer call these folks, and if he does, will a responsible person answer the phone? 

Anyway, I figured I should have a page that deals with something other than elite food issues since most of the world’s people and certainly this bunch in Newark’s South Ward are hungry and need our help.