Cold outside but a very merry meal!

Tonight, our last meal of 2013, Furmano's sponsored the meal with entertainment and extra special treats (check out the angel cookie picture!) Please take a moment to check out the Furmano's company website: http://furmanos.com/  See you in 2014!

 

 

 

 

Hawaiian Meal on a Snowy Day

Despite the storm that blew through central Pennsylvania this week, making the roads an icy mess, we still hosted Community Harvest!
The meal for the day was Hawaiian meatballs- meatballs on rice with sweet and sour sauce and pineapples- with roasted vegetables and applesauce! We were lucky to have volunteers from St. Pauls United Church of Christ in West Milton to help set up and begin preparing the meal.

We started out by peeling carrots and chopping up sunchokes, a root vegetable, to make the side.

 The image below is a sunchoke, which tastes like a water chestnut before it is cooked, and similar to a potato if it is baked.

The result was a delicious vegetable medley.

The Lewisburg Community Garden provided us with a few heads of cabbage, that regular volunteer Sarah processed to add to the vegetable mix.

As usual, we had help from Eddie, who knows the Community Harvest routine better than anyone.

By the time dinner was ready to serve, there were 68 people ready and waiting, a pretty good turnout on a day with such nasty weather! We had a handful of volunteers from Bucknell and St. Paul's to serve dinner. As a surprise dessert, we had Mr. Sticky's Sticky Buns from a Bucknell Brigade fundraiser!

Next week dinner will be prepared by a local restaurant! During the month of December and early January, we always need more volunteers because students are away so check out our website to volunteer! Volunteer here!

Post-Thanksgiving Creativity

This week at Community Harvest, we had the all familiar challenge of how to incorporate Thanksgiving leftovers into another delicious meal. We decided to make chicken stir fry with remaining vegetables, a salad, and squash side dish.

We started out by chopping peppers and the squash down to size. We peeled and boiled carrots and broccoli to have as a second healthy side dish. 

Volunteers from Delta Gamma Sorority at Bucknell and from a local youth group helped serve the meal and clean up afterwards!

Many hands make for light work! If you or a group is interested in volunteering at Community Harvest, check out our website at https://sites.google.com/a/bucknell.edu/community-harvest/!

Thanksgiving Feast!

The Holiday Season is upon us! Thanksgiving is Thursday, but we celebrated early at Community Harvest. This Monday we had more volunteers than ever to help make a delicious meal with seven different dishes plus dessert!

We started out by washing kale, swiss chard, and spinach that was grown in the Community Garden. Below the brothers of Phi Kappa Psi are hard at work despite the cold water.

There was a plethora of potatoes, sweet potatoes, and carrots to be washed, peeled, and chopped. The squash was also chopped up and baked. The processing was a team effort and went smoothly, with only a few cut fingers.

And of course Lynn, the Community Harvest director, had her ever important no-cut glove.

At the same time, there was stuffing in the oven and potatoes being mashed! Most importantly was the main course- turkey, provided by Parkhurst Dining Services. Ben, another director and regular volunteer, carved the turkey with the boys from Phi Psi.

The result was a beautiful buffet of all the holiday staples: turkey, potatoes, stuffing, gravy, bread, squash, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, creamed spinach, and homemade pumpkin bars.

The meal was served with help from Bucknell Students in Catholic Campus Ministry, and all the volunteers stayed to help with the cleanup endeavor.

With everyone's help, well over one hundred people enjoyed a warm Thanksgiving meal with their community this week. Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at Community Harvest!!!

Don't Forget the Oven!

It was another hectic week at Community Harvest with 98 meals to serve! The regular volunteers and directors from the Bucknell Office of Civic Engagement worked to cook a warm and healthy shepherd's pie for the main entree. We also baked homemade corn bread made from scratch.

There is the corn bread fresh out of the oven! In addition to corn bread, we also had a fresh salad with kale and carrots from the Lewisburg Community Garden. 

It took a few hours to wash all of the greens and peel the carrots, but the end result was worth it! The salad was topped with a homemade raspberry vinaigrette dressing. When it was time to serve dinner, we had volunteers from the local Methodist church and the Bucknell Women's Golf Team.  

 Our volunteers worked hard to create a delicious pear cobbler that was all ready to go- until we forgot to turn on the oven! Sometimes things don't always go as planned, but we froze the cobbler to be ready for next week! The Methodist and Golf Team volunteers also helped clean up so we are prepared to return next week!

Warm Meals during Cold Weather

Even though it is getting colder outside, the kitchen was nice and warm at Community Harvest. Donations and vegetables from the Community Garden allow us to continue providing hot meals in Milton every Monday at St. Andrew's Church.

This week the main course was baked ham and mashed sweet potatoes! Volunteers started out by peeling and chopping the potatoes. We had help from Delta Gamma and Alpha Chi Omega sorority members, and Sigma Phi Epsilon brothers from Bucknell.

After the potatoes were chopped, they were boiled down to a mashed consistency. The results smelled delicious and tasted even better! The potatoes were picked earlier that day from the Community Garden.

The Garden also provided us with vegetables for a salad: green and red peppers, spinach, kale, and sunchokes. Sunchokes are a type of artichoke that tastes like water chestnuts.

The salad was topped with a homemade dressing made from scratch with apple cider vinegar. When it came time to serve dinner, we had help from a local youth group and more brothers from Sigma Phi Epsilon.

The volunteers also helped organize the Community Harvest pantry, in efforts to be approved for donations from the Food Bank! Over seventy people ate meals at Community Harvest this week.