Cooks Rescue Food Through Unique Recipes

April 29, 2007

Times Argus
BARRE – The aromas of coriander, cardamom and cumin permeate the air of the large, immaculate kitchen at the Vermont Foodbank. In the rear of the kitchen, an Indian beef creation made with sweet potatoes, green vegetables, basmati rice, a No. 10 can of roasted red peppers, spice paste and coffee creamer simmers in a 2-foot by 4-foot tilt skillet. Chili bubbles in a 30-gallon steam kettle to the right. Fifty pounds of baked potatoes, cooling in pans on top of ovens to the left of the tilt skillet, will soon be filled with a Pennsylvania Dutch potato and zucchini mixture and baked again.

Jim Worcester and David Moyer, both wearing baseball caps and white aprons, are preparing the ready-to-heat meals that will be measured into plastic bags, frozen and distributed to food shelves and community meal sites.

Worcester, a lean, voluble man with a thick gray moustache, came to the Foodbank's kitchen in 2005 from Sarducci's, where he worked as prep cook. Moyer, younger and quieter, recently arrived from Applebee's.

Now, instead of the high-stress juggling act of turning out scores of individual orders, the two face a different challenge: They cook 400 to 600 pounds of food a day and never know what ingredients they'll be working with. They find their fun in turning the previous day's food donations into nutritious and appetizing meals.

"The deal with this is you never know what you're going to get," Worcester says. "It's like a puzzle."

Here's an example: From time to time, the state of Vermont tests trout at the hatcheries and ships safe fish to the foodbank.

"They used to go to the landfill, but now we get them on ice," Worcester says. "We'll have a day where we're basically roasting off, say, 700 or 800 pounds of lakers or rainbows – trout that the state raises at the fish hatcheries."

When a big load of food arrives and has to be cooked immediately, the pace can become intense. The trout, for example, have to be gutted and the heads taken off before they can be cooked. "It's something else!" exclaims Worcester. "I'm cooking off trout at 6:30 in the morning!"

Sheer volume dictates that the trout simply be roasted, put in plastic bags and frozen.

"If we don't get overwhelmed with it, we'll do something fancier," Worcester says, "but if you get 800 pounds of fish, it's hard to come up with enough bread stuffing. The planets have to be aligned for us to have enough bread and onions and celery."

A volunteer comes in from another part of the kitchen and asks, "Can I have one more sheet of those labels?" She and other volunteers are bagging ready-to-heat meals. Students from Spaulding High School's culinary class come in three mornings a week to help, and to gain experience working in a commercial kitchen.

Recently, the pallets on the floor of the foodbank's capacious walk-in cooler held cartons of sweet potatoes, celery, tomatoes, mushrooms, zucchini, broccoli, carrots, turkey, ground lamb, top round roasts, sirloin steaks and lamb chops.

Supermarkets, notably eight Hannaford stores, pull meat nearing its freeze-by date and donate it to the foodbank, which sends a van around to "rescue" it. A year ago, the food would have ended up in the landfill.

(The foodbank, which itself could be considered a recycler of food, is part of a "zero-waste" program. If the packaging on meat is damaged, it's composted. Spoiled produce gets picked up by neighboring pig farmers.)

Today, the kitchen's stocks are low. Worcester and Moyer have worked through just about everything they have, except for a little meat which they are combining with canned goods.

They are forced to substitute ingenuity for planning. The two rarely repeat recipes in a single week. Regardless of how odd their raw materials are (they get a lot of ostrich meat), Worcester observes that "we usually have enough condiments that we get from salvage that we can wing it."

The condiments vary as wildly as the main ingredients. Recently they received a whole pallet, 1,500 pounds, of lemon herb paste. At the moment they have on hand clam base, several jars of ghee, macadamia nuts, mirin (a kind of Japanese rice wine) and Marsala spice paste. "We put it on roast chicken," Worcester says. "It breaks up the monotony."

The words "play" and "fun" crop up frequently in these cooks' speech.

Moyer says, "With what we get, we try to make some really nice stuff when we have time to play around and be creative."

Worcester notes, "We've done a lot of brining with pork roast – that's usually fun."

Once they had a prosciutto, a lot of frozen vegetables and some cream.

"We had this great old time where we made like a carbonara. We don't often get to work with rich stuff, but when it comes through, we have a good time with it." Once Worcester had some banana puree, which he used instead of sugar in a pork loin brine. "That was kind of nice," he recalls.

Beyond the fun of seeing what they can create, Moyer says, "I think it's great that we actually get to use our talents. It's self-rewarding to know that we're doing something to give back to the community. We were just talking about that this morning."

April 29, 2007

Press Room