THE GREAT PEPPER CAPER – GO FOOD BANK GO!

We may have leapt tall buildings in a single bound in our FOOD BANK efforts this week but WHAT A HAUL WERE WE PROVIDED!  This is what we began with:

25 lbs. ground turkey

15 C. grape tomatoes

1 beautiful overflowing case of Roma tomatoes

6 & 1/2 cases of white and cremini mushrooms (that were about to turn)

9 lbs. (dry) white rice

10 bunches of glorious kale – over-the-top

25 onions

20 pepperoncinis

I believe we used every pot to cook rice, make homemade tomato sauce, and a sauté of turkey, onions, chilis, and kale as well as all 4 of our largest roasting pans to cook and reduce all those mushrooms. We cooked all the rice in broth we made from FOOD BANK scraps we saved.

Next came the task of getting those darling peppers ready for stuffing and  had to use our amazing Wolf range as well as our little electric oven in the office.

This is what all those incredible ingredients yielded:

68 stuffed peppers, some with mushroom and rice, others with turkey/veggies/rice

21 individual 2 C. portions of cream of mushroom soup

14 individual portions of just mushrooms with rice with tomato sauce

2 lg containers of mushrooms for later FOOD BANK use

4 individual containers of mushroom paste for future FOOD BANK use

37 individual portions of turkey/veggies/rice topped with tomato sauce

4 bags of scraps for a future broth making session – we call it ‘stock options’

1 extra lg pizza made with ratatouille/tapenade/red pepper pesto, mushrooms AND mozzarella all from, you guessed it THE FOOD BANK – we called that a “workers’ perq” and it was delish.

Finally the packaging, wrestling into one of our 4 freezers awaiting return to the FOOD BANK next week and voila!

All that fun amounts to about 18 manhours by 4 folks over a 2-day period . . . small and blessed investment for folks to have something good and warm to eat, right?

Our sincere thanks and appreciation for the opportunity our local FOOD BANK folks afford us to have this much fun. . .support our FOOD BANK AND YOUR FOOD BANK – GET INVOLVED!