Note from Red, Operations Coordinator at SA

"Just wanted to let you all know that on behalf of the people that come to eat here at the Salvation Army Community Kitchen, we are so greatful that you all take the time to bring so many wonderful and different types of food here for them to eat. Once again thank you with all of my heart and Love you alll wo very much. Keep up the great work!!!!!!"

We love you Red. Thanks for all that YOU do.

Spinach taking over the herb garden.

Leadership team openings!

Leadership team applications are up! If you have any interest in a leadership position in a service organization you should definitely look into Campus Kitchen. We have great potential for growth, and we can use skills from all fields. Great at marketing? We need you! Have a talent for motivating people? You should definitely apply. Are you great at connecting with people? We can use that skill. We're looking for a strong group of dedicated volunteers who want to make a difference in Waco. Check us out.

Applications are available at www.baylor.edu/campuskitchen and are due April 13

Statistics

I stumbled upon this awesome tool today while browsing the National Campus Kitchen website. You can scroll over any part of America and find out the percentage of food insecure people in every county. McLennan county has a food insecurity rate of 18.9%. That's way too high. Baylor Campus Kitchen is fighting to lower that statistic with every meal we cook and pan of food we deliver.

Check the site out for yourself. Compare your home county to McLennan. Bexar county, where San Antonio is, has 16% food insecurity.

http://feedingamerica.org/our-network/the-studies/map-the-gap.aspx

What runs but never gets tired? Water!

After a long wait, we started planting the garden last Wednesday. This plant was a test plant to see how well the plants will do in our brand new garden. We planted a bed of tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, and okra. We had about 8 volunteers helping us out and finished rather quickly until we realized that the garden did not have a water hookup yet! (ohh noo) As some of you know, when you plant a new seedling in the ground, they need a nice drink of water so they can be happy in their new home. Well, the drip irrigation system was turned on, but I didn’t know what time it would come on and I really didn’t want our brand new baby plants to die on my watch. Luckily, some of our lovely volunteers from across the street let us borrow some water. We transported it in buckets and watered all of our new plants and they are doing great! I talked to one of the Campus Kitchen’s Reps from D.C. last week about our beds and she was amazed that we were planting tomato plants already because they just planted their cold weather plants. She said there was still snow on the ground (brrrr) so be glad you live in Texas!!

--Hannah Laird, Garden and Produce Coordinator

Survey fun

Volunteers!!!

we need your help.

As we try to grow and become more effective, a key ingredient to our success is your feedback. Take this survey and let us know how we can better use you to serve our community.

http://atrial.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_bNukudlFYRPB6EA

working out the kinks

We had a great Tuesday kitchen today. I had 4 volunteers, but I could have put more to work if needed. We made a snack mix for the Waco Arts Initiative for Grace and we half-way defrosted the pot roast. Good news is that the pot roast came individually packaged, so it should be good to go on Thursday. While the roast was defrosting today I had volunteers chop up veggies to go with the roast on Thursday, because Thursday's cooking shift has less time and they have to prep and cook.

--Jennifer Spear, Head Kitchen Manager

Why do potatoes make good detectives? Because they keep their eyes peeled.

Go check out Baylor’s Community Garden at 9^th and James! This garden will be the home of Campus Kitchen’s produce. Baylor’s Ecology program will also be teaching and helping us garden to the best of our abilities. The vegetables we will be growing this year are: drum roll please… radish, leeks seed, beets, carrots, kohlrabi seed, lettuce head, onion, peas, english peas, edible pod, swish chard, greens, kale, turnip, lettuce leaf, spinach and Collards! Any suggestions about other vegetables are welcome. Most of the produce will be used by the CK kitchen to prepare meals that will be distributed through community non-profits. We are so excited and lucky to have this wonderful opportunity to have such a great space to garden. Our garden will be completely organic and awesome. We cannot wait to get started but with this crazy Waco weather the garden is not completed yet. Once it is completed we will start planting right away. Our first garden training was canceled because of weather and will be rescheduled before the first plant. We hope to have a date soon and we will let you know as soon as possible.

-Hannah Laird, Garden and Produce Coordinator

Tomato soup for the soul

The cooking part of Campus Kitchen is getting off to a great start this semester. This Tuesday we learned how to improvise. We had planned to make a chicken broth based stew, but quickly discovered we only had one box of chicken broth! We substituted tomato soup, added some cheese, and made it work. Thanks to KXA and some new, dedicated volunteers, we had more help then we knew what to do with. One brave volunteer chopped onions, one chopped the herbs, and one learned how to separate garlic and crack open the cloves. The onions were sauteed while the soup warmed up, then everything was combined to make a delicious-smelling stew. With the addition of some leftover spinach, the improvised recipe was complete.

This coming Tuesday we'll be starting up our partnership with Waco Arts Initiative. We'll be making a meal and children's snacks, so if you came last Tuesday and didn't have much to do, definitely come back next week. We are excited about working with WAI, an organization that provides art programs for children who've had funding cut for their art programs. Since we've never served primarily children before, this is going to be a fun experience as we experiment with creating fun, interesting, and healthy snacks for kids.

Opinion article from Tuesday's Lariat about CK--check it out

http://baylorlariat.com/2011/02/08/2310/

Garden Training Session Opportunity

The garden training session will be this Wednesday, February 9th at 6 pm in Goebel Building (located right next to Baylor's Energy Complex between the library and Russell gym) Room 120. We plan to start planting at the end of February and beginning of March and in order to volunteer in the Garden you must attend a training session. This session will be a short, fun and informative, equipping volunteers how to be efficient in the garden. We will be needing lots of volunteers to help so bring your friends. This is an awesome opportunity for you to help start this wonderful project!

Sonic drinks: still good, but no longer necessary

Campus Kitchen is looking to broaden its horizons in Spring 2011. Our marketing and PR people are working together to create a veritable storm of promotional material and hopefully reign in some new volunteers. We have more consistency than ever, so our focus is shifting to streamlining what we already do so we can do more. As we grow and change we hope to hear your thoughts and encouragement. To that end, we're going to start blogging weekly. There will be updates from the garden, stories (and maybe some recipes?) from the kitchen, anecdotes from delivery shifts, volunteer profiles and much much more. Stay tuned, let us know you're listening and come out to volunteer whenever you can.

Here's the first in our attempt to get up close and personal with the exec board of Baylor's Campus Kitchen. Ellie Keeling has been running delivery shifts for Campus Kitchen for several years. When other volunteers don't show, Ellie comes through, and has been known to keep the deliveries running almost single handedly. Here are her thoughts...

This semester Campus Kitchen has started off with a bang. For the first time in Baylor CKP history we actually have a different leader for every delivery shift. Yesterday, I had the privilege of training our newest leader. Not only was it exciting to be adding another set of hands to the team, but it was also really cool to witness the expansion of this organization first hand. Gone are the days of dragging roommates and close friends into volunteering. Helpful as they were, they generally only complied because I promised Sonic happy hour drinks as a reward. Now we have had several instances in just three short weeks of school where we have had an excess of help. Never would I have expected to be asking people to come back and help another day. Though this is an amazing victory for Campus Kitchen, I also think that it brings about more opportunity and responsibility than ever before. Campus Kitchens is on the verge of becoming an even more amazing organization as well as an asset to Baylor university and the Waco community.

Interest Meeting

Hey everyone! We will be having an interest meeting tomorrow, February 1st, in the Fentress Room of the SUB. Come check it out!!!

COMMUNITY GARDEN GROUNDBREAKING CEREMONY!