kitchenmage

Feeding Hungry People and Other Charitable Acts

This is epic-length, well for this medium at least, but forgive me. I felt it was an important topic and I trust that if you hang out around here you have a long enough attention span to handle it. Besides, I got to make up terms and use bullet lists and my deeply geeky writer side is just dancing with joy. Thank you for your indulgence. ~beth

The holiday season is creeping up and for a lot of us that means we are going to be feeding people. Not just our family and friends at various gatherings – the "orphan" Thanksgiving is one of my favorites – but also by choosing some food-related charities when it comes to charitable donations and gift-giving.

One way to find deserving charities is asking friends who they support, so I did just that. I got some great recommendations, starting with, of course, food banks.

Food banks are the most fundamental and most direct way to feed hungry people. I am a huge fan of local food banks, having been involved as staff, volunteer and client. To find a food bank close to you, go to Feeding America's food bank locator. You can also make a donation while you're there. Alternatively, Share our Strength is dedicated to ending childhood hunger.

I live in the northwest so it's not surprising that a couple of local food banks got a shout-out:

• The Auburn Food Bank, which has a big annual breakfast fundraiser coming up November 4 from 7-8:30 AM, call 253-804-5696 or drop them e-mail for more info. If you are in the area, I hear it's a great event for a good cause. 
• The University District food bank in Seattle got a couple of votes, too. Check out this video that explains a bit more about them.

An Obama wordle...and a hungry child

This has little to do with food, but I figure there must be one or two of you who are also word geeks, political geeks (oh yeah, everyone is a political geek this week!), or just plain curious. Besides, since breaking my arm, I have been mostly banished from the kitchen because, well, let's just say that when I cut an onion and cry, it's not about the Syn-propanethial-S-oxide.

So I have been reading a lot, watching endless political TV and playing on twitter just a bit. In the process, I have discovered all sorts of time-sucks, er, I mean cool and useful web tools, One of my favorites is Wordle,

Wordle, in case you have missed it, is this marvelous tool that lets you create custom word clouds using a piece of text, an RSS feed, or even someone's del.icio.us tags. It's a great way to get a quick impression of someone's writing, giving you a quick visual of the topics they address and an idea of their style.

A number of websites have started to use them to illustrate various things. One of my favorites is cookthink, which attaches one to its cookthink questionnaires, which uses a wordle of each person's RSS feed to give you a snapshot of the person being interviewed. Some of the wordles there have one or two clear favored topics, like Julie Biuso's champagne, or Carol Fenster's chocolate.(Note to self: bookmark their sites...)

One word that everyone uses a lot? "Favorite." That's good because it means people are writing about food they truly love. The interviews are interesting, too. Check them out if you haven't yet.

But that's not why we're here...

Adequate food is a human right!

Today is the 60th birthday of one of my favorite documents: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UN has a special anniversary page up where you can get the DHR in 360 languages to share with your friends.

As a food-writer, I want to point to article 25, which starts:

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. (emphasis mine)

Simple stuff on paper, but the reality? Not so much.

Since  typing is still hard for me, I'd like you to create your own vision of hunger for me - and share it in comments if you wish. Close your eyes and remember a time when you were really hungry. Not 'nothing since lunch and it's 9pm hungry' but 'it's the 28th and no shopping for 5 days hungry.' What did it feel  like: physically, emotionally, socially? Many of us can remember the gnawing of a truly empty stomach; the horrible choice of feeding our kids or ourselves, but not both; or standing in a foodbank line for hours. (Sadly, I can pull all three of these scenarios from memory.)

Imagine that you live with that every day of your life. Hungry. Every. Day.

Now go to Feeding America (Second Harvest) and give generously. Or pack up a bag for your local foodbank. Or take an unemployed friend grocery shopping. Whatever you choose, please do something to help another person achieve the food security we all deserve.

Dish up literacy! Dine out for a good cause

Eat out on Thursday, September 18, at a Dish Up Literacy restaurant and they will donate a at least 20% of their proceeds to help provide new books and reading resources to children in need.  Dish Up Literacy, a benefit for Page Ahead Children’s Literacy Program, allows diners to put books in the hands of kids simply by going out to eat.

There are a number of great restaurants participating: Julia's, Macrina Bakery, FX McRory's, Ten Mercer and others.  If you aren't in Seattle, there are options for you, too. One of my favorite local breakfast cafes, The Place Family Restaurant is even involved. Must be my excuse to eat Northwest Eggs Benedict (made with crab cakes instead of Canadian Bacon).  Check out who's participating at Dish Up Literacy.

A Taste for Reading benefit lunch (Seattle)

Food and books, two of my favorite things, come together next week in Seattle at A Taste for Reading(pdf), a benefit luncheon for Page Ahead. Even better, there is entertainment from an as yet unannounced school group, so you get your dose of cute kids too. Page Ahead is a children's literacy program that distributes books to kids and encourages parent and community active involvement in reading with children.

A Taste for Reading happens next Wednesday, April 9, at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center on Seattle’s Waterfront. Lunch will be served at 11:30, with the entertainment at noon. They are even promising that it will end "promptly at 1" so you can all scurry back to work. A donation will be requested (the meal is valued at ~30) and contributions over 250 will be matched.

To make (required) reservation, drop them email or call 206.461.0123.

do you support public radio?

If you are one of those folks who donate to public radio, please consider doing so tomorrow to  KMUN in Astoria, Oregon between 10-12 (west coast) tomorrow. someoneElse will be on All Kinds of Folk and it's pledge drive time so I am angling for quick donations and thus more music, less begging.

There are rumors of me having to speak too. One can only hope the rumors are not true because, while I like music, I know nothing about it. "I gave it a ten because it's got a good beat and you can knead bread to it!" is my fallback position. Again, I think more money=less talk - in which case, I may be writing checks myself!

The KMUN audio stream is available online, either via their preferred method, which involves installing software that lets your machine host bits of the stream (meaning your upstream bandwidth and some hard drive space) or my preferred method of snagging the stream here and plugging it into something like Windows Media Player.

If you decide to contribute, please tell the nice person on the phone that you are a friend of kitchenMage. I'd love to feel a presence from the food-people out there. Sort of like a big invisible hug while I am in radioland, which is so not my usual hangout.

KMUN
Donation info page
Donate here
503.325.0010
1.800.528.0010

climate convergence in skamokawa this week

In the midst of global climate change and with the lack of a sane energy policy at the front of many people in evenTinierTown's minds, there is a bit of hope on the horizon - or at least a great weekend.

The west coast Climate Convergence is slated for this week in Skamokawa, WA (yep, evenTinierTown is on the map!). During this event, a lot of crunchy granola folks will converge on evenTinierTown, talk climate change, party and listen to people like Starhawk speak. (hmmm, are there people 'like' Starhawk?)

Dish up literacy!

Remember the old line: Reading is fundamental? Seems that the idea of literacy as a foundation for life in a post-industrial society has been losing ground since they (whoever "they" are) decided that kids need Ritalin and Game Boys rather than books, so I really have to applaud any group that's still working on literacy as if it mattered.

As you might imagine, I was delighted to hear about Dish Up Literacy, a project of Page Ahead, a children's literacy group in Seattle, which offers one of the most pleasant ways of giving to a good cause: go out for a meal. Food+books, what could be better?

On August 3rd, a range of restaurants in six Washington counties, all corporate-owned Denny's in Washington will donate a portion of their sales to Page Ahead, which will distribute books to school-age children with the proceeds. You can choose anything from a nice dinner to a quick lunch, or maybe both!

Unfortunately for me, no restaurants down my way are participating, so I am counting on my readers in the state to go out to dinner for me. Call it a favor to me if you need the excuse. Your assignment: eat at a participating restaurant on August 3, 2006. Tough job, I know, but I think you can handle it.

Cookbook for a cause

While I am currently off in writing land and this site languishes (which might seem more appropriate in August when it's hot and humid and thus languishy), I'd like to take a moment and point out a project in which I had a wee smidge of involvement.

And They Cook, Too is a cookbook comprised of recipes donated by all sorts of bloggers, some of whom you might know, many of whom you probably haven't heard of yet. Spearheaded by Ginger Mayerson and Kathy Flake, all proceeds from this book will go to Doctors Without Borders, an admirable organization whose members travel the world providing medical assistance in that superhero style of running into the places most sane people are running away from.

There's a list of contributors here if you want to tease yourself, and find some interesting new blogs in the process. But really, it's only 15 bucks, so give up your take-out espresso for a week and give a little for the cause.

My contribution? Well, it's a stream of consciousness semi-recipe and might even make you laugh...at my pain. But that's what writer's have pain for: to make others laugh at it.

Cookbook for Doctors Without Borders

Kathy at What Do I Know? and Ginger of The Hackenblog are creating a book to benefit Doctors Without Borders, which is a most worthy organization. They are looking for recipes, short essays, some artwork, poetry, and so on. (note to writers: I even read the legal stuff and it's fine, you retain copyright, etc) I've offered my Fish Tail Soup recipe as a sort of cross between humor and cooking. Check out the idea and see if you've got something to contribute to this great project.