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McGruder garden is ready for spring!

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Thanks to these ladies for contributing their artwork to the McGruder Community Garden. This space is now truly full of life in many senses of the word!

Thanks to these students from Glencliff High School for volunteering in the garden. They worked hard to dig a new plot in the orchard, and the community gardeners have since planted it with potatoes!

After planting spring crops and working together to get seed potatoes in the ground, the McGruder Green Thumbers gathered around picnic tables to relax and enjoy a delicious lunch.

Generosity!

This guy! Continued thanks to John Patrick of Foggy Hollow Farm who dropped off 30 dozen certified organic eggs for us to use in our meals. John is building a sustainable poultry network in our community and his enthusiasm for chickens is contagious! You can purchase his eggs, meat and chickens. Learn more at foggyhollowfarm.net

The MEAT Report

Several weeks ago, The Nashville Food Project got a call from an event coordinator at Opryland Gaylord asking whether we could receive a large donation of fresh meat (never been frozen) at the conclusion of the American Meat Convention. We were told the take would be something like a thousand pounds. Over the course of a few days, we got a plan in place to recover so much meat: organized volunteers, rented freezer space, counted vehicles, and purchased wax-lined boxes to be palletized. In a caravan of trucks and station wagons, our people arrived at the convention center last Monday evening, ready to pack up thousands of pounds of meat for inclusion in our meals.

As the conference was winding down, company reps began packing up, leaving all of their meat products on display for our team to pick up. In food project aprons, we went from booth to booth, boxing up pork, chicken, beef, turkey, lamb and veal, as well as some other exotic meats, like boar, buffalo, duck and goose. These were products that would have otherwise gone into the dumpster at the end of the night. Did you all know 40% of all food in our country gets wasted? And one person in every five people in Tennessee doesn’t have enough healthy food to eat? The wasteful nature of our economy is one of our most egregious sins, especially when we remember we are talking about actual life wasted—each animal's life an important part of God's inexhaustibly beautiful creation.

The Nashville Food Project boxed up 5,100 pounds of high-quality meat that night! Based on current outputs, this should be enough meat to get us through 10 months of meals shared with people in need. I am proud of the new challenges The Nashville Food Project is able to meet, thanks to the TREMENDOUS support from our ever-widening circle of friends. If you want to get involved in this joyful, life-giving, sometimes-messy work, email us, and we will find a place for you!

 

Strawberry Ricotta Bread

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What to do with all our strawberries?! We recently received a beautiful donation of strawberries along along with a case of ricotta cheese. We found a delicious recipe for a tasty dessert bread and served it last week. The ricotta makes this bread low fat, moist and has a unique consistency that we all loved.

  • 2 eggs
  • 1 cup ricotta cheese
  • 1 cup buttermilk
  • 1 tbsp vanilla
  • 1 tbsp lemon juice
  • 4 tbsp melted butter (cooled)
  • 2 cups All purpose flour
  • 3/4 cup sugar
  • 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 1/8 tsp baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 tbsp lemon zest
  • 1 1/2 cups sliced strawberries

Preheat oven to 350. In a medium bowl, whisk ricotta cheese and then add eggs, beating until well combined. Add buttermilk, vanilla, lemon juice and cooled melted butter.

In another bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt and lemon zest. Add ricotta mixture to the flour mixture. Stir until just combined and then fold in strawberries.

Bake in greased 9 X 5 loaf pan for 30-40 minutes.