Skip to main content

Gourmet Cheese and Artisan Bread

Saturday morning J and I worked at our church's food pantry. We served about 36 familes and it was a great experience. We are signed up for duty once a month.

I don't know who has the job of soliciting the area grocery stores for their cast-offs but they do amazing work. We were handing out not just standard pantry fare of hamburger meat and chicken, but also quail, roast pork and filet mignon. There were the best brand names for fresh and dried pasta, roasted red peppers in fancy jars, and all sorts of ingredients for an epicurian's ideal kitchen. We had an entire line of gourmet cheese to distribute (brie, true parmesan, several varieties of blue, edam, herbed goat cheese, etc.), most $10-$25/lb, and a lot of that imported. Although I tried diligently to get the families to take their share of this amazing bounty and gave them easy ideas on how to use the cheese, a lot of them shied away from the cheeses they had never tried or heard of (They kept requesting American, which we ran out of very quickly while the Brie sat unwanted!!!)

We did not go into the assignment expecting to get anything but the satisfaction of helping others out of it. However, we were delightfully surprised to find that after the shift is over at noon, *all* of the remaining bread and dairy products [which are at or about to be at their sell-by dates] have to be tossed for health reasons. Therefore, they are open to the volunteers to take home.

So, in summary, we were able to take home several wedges of great cheese, along with my favorite Artisan bread (cranberry pecan loaf), other breads (whole grain sandwich loaves to put in the freezer, baguettes, etc), and bags of whole bean starbucks coffee (most families do not have grinders so the gourmet coffee builds up very quickly that Starbucks casts off to the pantry).

If we keep volunteering at the pantry, I don't think we will ever have to buy bread or gourmet cheese again.

Comments

Rho said…
I love volunteering at the food pantry! I'm glad you had a good time.
Anonymous said…
sounds like fun my friend

Popular posts from this blog

Board Game Review: Hues and Cues

Last week we received Hues and Cues from The Op Games. We recently finished playing through Scooby-Doo Escape from the Haunted Mansion (a fantastic game in The Op Games catalogue designed by Jay Cormier, Sen-Foong Lim, and Kami Mandell that you should absolutely pick up to play with your family) and wanted to give another game from the same publisher a go. I picked Hues and Cues because I’ve been pleasantly surprised by other “test whether our minds think the same way” games such as The Mind   and Wavelength. In Hues and Cues , players gather around a large central board comprised of 480 graduating colors of the rainbow surrounded by an x-y axis and scoring table. White and black (which are technically not colors) are conspicuously absent as are shades (mixtures of color + black; e.g., grey) and tints (mixtures of color + white; e.g., cream).  On each player’s turn, they draw a card with four colors and the x-y axis codes of those colors depicted and they select one. They a...

Board Game Review: Expeditions Gears of Corruption

L ast year I reviewed Expeditions and ranked it #1 among all Stonemaier games on account of the challenging intellectual puzzle it presents. This year I have played my way through the new expansion, Gears of Corruption , and I’m delighted to let you know that it makes the base game even better. That the expansion so cohesively builds on the base game should not be a surprise to anyone who closely examines the original box for Expeditions. All expansion components perfectly fit in that box including the 2 new mechs that nestle in the placeholder cubbies clearly made for them.  That can’t be coincidence. There might a few features rolled into Corruption of Gears that were developed as a result of consumer feedback on the base game (I’m looking at you, wild meeple), but my theory is that Stonemaier did a Lord of the Rings maneuver with this game and its expansions, designing the entire game with most of the additions integrated up front, and then breaking it into base + expansions fo...

Board Game Review: Expeditions

Expeditions is my favorite game in the Stonemaier Games portfolio to date. The game is a sequel to Scythe, and continues the narrative years in the future. It has taken everything I loved in Scythe and expanded on it, while chucking out everything I didn’t care for (the combat). Designed by Jamey Stegmaier, Expeditions brings us into an age when a meteorite has crash landed into Siberia and things begin to go sideways for all who encounter it. One team after another sets out to investigate the crash site and they are never heard from again. No one knows what happened to them. Now it’s our turn to find out what’s really going on, each of us leading a competing expedition team into Siberia to bring back desperately needed answers. During a game of Expeditions, all players are seated around the game board, which is made up of individually placed hex tiles laid out as shown above. At the bottom of the game board is an insert affectionately known as the base camp. The base camp holds ...