Community Harvest - Cooked, Sealed, Delivered
Just before Thanksgiving, volunteers from Good Bowls, Pittsboro Eats, and Chatham Alliance teamed up to cook meals for the first Community Harvest Campaign. During the month of October the inaugural drive raised over $3,500 to prepare healthy meals for families-in-need in the community.
Sally Bond from Pittsboro Eats preps some chicken thighs
During the pandemic, Good Bowls and Pittsboro Eats worked together on the Pay-It-Forward program, which similarly raised money for the meals and cooked them at local restaurants - helping local families and restaurants at the same time. Now that the pandemic is behind us, we’ve joined with the newly formed non-profit Chatham Alliance and the Pay-It-Forward program has grown up into Community Harvest. We’re still soliciting donations and now with Chatham Alliance we’re connected to more organizations & community partners - enabling us to reach even more neighbors in need of a healthy meal.
Cutting up 60 pounds of cheddar
For the first Community Harvest meal production day, we decided to make the popular Farmhouse Mac n’ Cheese. This classic Good Bowl features marinated chicken, sweet potatoes, broccoli, and squash tossed with a spiral noodle and creamy cheese sauce. The chicken is donated from Mountaire Farms and the vegetables are locally sourced through Happy Dirt. So with the meat and veggies on hand, the team arrived at the kitchen early in the morning and set out to make 400 pounds of Farmhouse Mac.
Good Bowls Operations Manager Alice Lu with a monster sweet potato
When possible, we use vegetables that are ‘cosmetic seconds’ which means sometimes the sweet potatoes are as big as footballs. The cheese comes in large blocks, so the designated cheese cutter spent hours prepping cubes for the bechamel cheese sauce, and boiling 70 pounds of Cavatappi noodles took a large portion of the afternoon. Good Bowls are all vegetable forward meals, and to be honest, cutting that many veggies took us a bit longer than expected. When it was all said and done, the team worked for 12 hours to get the mac n’ cheese made and mixed.
Dave Haman from Chatham Alliance with a rack of Mac ready for sealing
After the mac cooled overnight, we arrived back at the kitchen the next morning and got the meals bowled up, sealed, and frozen so they can be distributed to local families. The meals are frozen instead of being refrigerated since it greatly increases the shelf life of each bowl. It’s challenging to get a healthy meal made, distributed, and eaten at the family dinner table if you only have 4 to 5 days before it spoils. But with frozen sealed meals, these 500 bowls of frozen Farmhouse Mac can be given to our community partners and then distributed to families in need of healthy meals.
With 7 large bins of meals in the freezer, we’ll now work with our community partners CIS Chatham, CORA Food Pantry, and Chatham Chuckwagon to distribute the meals throughout the next few weeks and over the holidays. The next Community Harvest Campaign starts in January 2024, so stay tuned. And remember, you can always donate to the campaign any time.
The bowl-sealing team with 7 bins of Farmhouse Mac n’ Cheese ready for distribution
