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Hot Links: Hunger Awareness Project, Denny’s famine ads, hipsters on food stamps
This post is part of a Hunger Awareness Project with Austin food bloggers and the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas. Local bloggers will be cooking and eating from a typical offering from a food pantry and blogging about their experience to shed light on a situation that 50,000 Central Texas face each week. Click here or here to find out more, including how to participate or donate.
Keep Austin Tasty: Justin and Han are sticking with their initial goal of showing what it “might be like for a young Chinese couple, possibly recent immigrants to this country, trying to reproduce the familiar flavors of home with our available ingredients” by making dishes such as garlic fried rice and skipping meals.
Savor The Earth: Beans and rice were already staples in Nicole’s diet, and she has a good stove-top method for cooking rolled oats.
Stetted: In addition to feeding her family of three from the food pantry list and food stamp money, Megan is being diligent about tracking how much each meal costs, as well as incorporating fresh produce from her garden. A dinner of potato pancakes cost less than $2.51 to make.
Girl Gone Grits: Kristina plotted out a week’s worth of meals using the list of ingredients from the food pantry. She even posted an easy recipe for lasagna soup, which calls for a box of Lasagna Hamburger Helper.
Texas, Times Two: The mother-daughter team of Lauren and Dee Kincke are blogging about their experiences on Bytes from Texas and Texas to Mexico. If you’re looking for new ways to eat oats, check out Lauren’s recipe for oatmeal pancakes. Dee has a recipe for stuffed cabbage rolls that use many ingredients already in your pantry.
Lisa is Cooking: With so many pinto beans to work with, Lisa made vegetarian collard rolls with poblano rice stuffed with protein- and fiber-rich beans.
Austin Farm To Table: Kristi, who has been volunteering with the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas for four years, is incorporating vegetables from her Farmhouse Delivery CSA with the items from the food pantry list to create meals for the week, which included a kale and egg Spanish tortilla.
South Austin Foodie Adventures: Suzanna has been getting creative with her ingredients by making a dip from cannellini white beans and granola from the oats. “I don’t know why, but granola cereals (well, cereals in general) are some of the most overpriced items, and you can make your own for pennies!” she writes.
Something To Chew On: Summer writes about what a luxury it is to spend $20 on burgers and fries with her husband when they were out and about and starving. “We had just spent — in five minutes on one meal — almost what I spent to supplement this project for a whole week.” Concern for food waste has prompted her to enroll in a free composting class hosted by the City of Austin.
Fete and Feast: Natanya created a podcast about why we’re doing this project, which includes some good information about how you can help. The Capital Area Food Bank can buy $25 worth of food with a $5 donation, which Natanya points out is like one drink at happy hour.
Austin Epicurean: Aaron is making good use of a whole chicken by eating the legs for dinner one night, cold chicken salad on garlic toast the next and turning the rest into stock.
Cheap, Cheap: Eggs are one of the cheapest and most diverse forms of protein, and two bloggers (Cameron of What To Eat and Justin and Han of Keep Austin Tasty) made similar spring onion pancakes using eggs and green onions. Tired of scrambled eggs? Former restaurant critic Leslie Kelly getting creative with her egg-a-day experiment, where she’s cooking and eating at least one egg a day and blogging about it.
Food Stamp Challenge: In 2008, Capital Area Food Bank of Texas CEO David Davenport ate for a month on the amount of money allocated from food stamps. He was allowed to spent $21 a week on food and beverages, and by the end of the four weeks, he’d lost 18 pounds, four pounds less than his doctors allowed, which meant he had to stop the challenge just a few days shy of a month.
Hipsters on Food Stamps: The bad economy and rising unemployment rate has hit twenty- and thirty-something hipsters just like everyone else, which means that some of them who qualify for food stamps are using the money to eat better than they’d be able to afford to otherwise.
Stamp Out Hunger: On Saturday, May 8, the U.S. Postal Service is hosting its annual Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive. All you have to do is place nonperishable food items such as juice, pasta, cereal, rice and canned vegetables, fruits, meats or soup in a paper bag near your mailbox, and your mail delivery person will pick it up and deliver to a local food bank.
Famine Isn’t Funny: After facing criticism of being insensitive to victims of one of the worst famines in history, Denny’s pulled a promo for all-you-can-eat fries and pancakes to mark the 150th anniversary of the end of the Irish potato famine earlier this year.
Overweight and Hungry?: It’s a hard scenario to comprehend, but millions of Americans, especially children, struggle with both their weight and food insecurity. Low-income families who don’t have much money for food end up spending it on high-calorie, but nutritionally deficient meals, which is especially hard on the still developing bodies of young children.
Lasagna soup photo by Kristina Wolter, chicken salad photo by Aaron Kull, potato pancake photo by Megan Myers and collard roll photo by Lisa Lawless.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment Categories: Food in the news, Hot Links
Comments
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By Lisa Goddard
April 27, 2010 2:27 PM | Link to this
What a great update! It’s been wonderful reading about the recipes and sharing this project with the team at CAFB. Thanks, Addie.
By kunde
May 9, 2011 7:39 AM | Link to this
Lots of great reading here, thank you! I had been researching on yahoo when I identified your publish, I’m going to add your feed to Google Reader, I look forward to additional from you.