Icepacolypse 2011

Submitted February 04, 2011 by Ben Shine | 1 comment

Having spent two days cooped up in the house due to Icepocalypse 2011, I was secretly excited to get a text Wednesday night from my boss, Debbie, that said, “We’ll be working tomorrow. Come dressed to work in the kitchen!” While I love a snow day or two and had a great time at home this week, I was ready to get back to life.

If you saw Jennifer’s post on Monday, you saw that we were ready. Icepocalypse was a nasty storm that shut down a city, but we saw it coming. Before the first layer of ice hit city streets, we had loaded up our partner agencies with enough extra food to get them through a few days if we had to shut down.

The plan worked perfectly, but after two days, our partner agencies needed food again. Seeing as how most roads, our parking lot and every walkway were still covered in an inch or more of ice, Second Helpings made the decision to ask our Thursday volunteers to stay home. We couldn’t ask them to risk it. The staff was going to have to make it happen – and that’s exactly what we did.

We all showed up on Thursday morning ready to cook. We were surprised that a few board members and volunteers didn’t heed our advice and joined us. Fortunately, they were seasoned vets in the Hunger Relief kitchen, and together we formed a small, rag-tag, hunger fighting team!

I had planned on blogging throughout my shift and posting regular updates on Facebook. That is, until I remembered how hard the work is in the kitchen! So, I tapered off with the photos and updates, and got to work. Social media can always take a back seat to eliminating hunger! I teamed up with Director of Volunteers, Becky, and we chopped 9 whole turkeys into ¾” pieces while saving the nasty bits for stock.

After chopping turkey for two hours, we cleaned and sanitized our station. Becky and I got rewarded for our hard work and got moved to the tilt skillet, where we really got to cook. Liz showed us a stack of tubs filled with bacon and pasta. As she heated up the skillet she told us we were making a pasta carbonara. She gave us a few instructions and we were off. Little did we know that while Becky and I had been chopping turkey, our Administrative Assistant, Lauren, had made her first ever béchamel sauce, although you wouldn’t know it from the final results. After combining ingredients and tasting, we compromised on salt and pepper levels and panned up our concoction – 8 pans, or 240 meals.

I had a blast, as I love to get my hands dirty in the kitchen. I also took a lot of playful guff from co-workers, with lines like, “Wow, Ben, who knew you could do real work!” and, “I thought you only ate food here, but you’re making it too?” Yes, I love to eat, but I’ve also been cooking my whole life. I have knife skills. I’m a consummate and thorough cleaner. I work hard.

There’s something different all together about working in our kitchen. Yes, it’s hard work, but there’s such an energy in that kitchen that it’s easy to not notice fatigue. And, to realize that the laborious chopping and dicing is going to make hundreds of meals to feed our hungriest neighbors – it made it difficult to want to stop at all.

 

Ben Shine is Communications and Development Manager at Second Helpings
 

Comments

Becky Fox
February 04th, 2011 4:09pm
For the record, Ben is being totally honest about his skills with a chef knife! He put me to shame!

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