If you live with an inadequate grocery budget, and you're mixing soup kitchen meals with home-cooked meals, then you want to make sure your grocery store purchases actually save you money and give you more free, productive days that are your own. For a soup kitchen user, the ultimate luxury is being able to have at least one meal at home, per day. Ideally, two meals, breakfast and dinner.
There's three foods that will save you lots and lots of money, lots of time, and lots of headaches. The lentils and eggs are especially good when combined with vegetables from the garbage or food banks. None of these things need refrigeration (even the eggs), and they're super cheap and easy to prepare:
Lentils are good poor person food: they're cheap, they're high in protein, and unlike beans, they can be boiled up without pre-soaking, so they're fast to make. Maybe a half-hour. Just stick them in water with a tiny bit of salt, bring them to a boil and hold them at a simmer, and after about fifteen or twenty minutes of this, you start checking them every ten minutes or so to see if they're soft yet. While they're coming to a boil, add any veggies you've got lying around. Chop the veggies up super fine, or shred them with a cheese grater. Season them with whatever spices you want. The result is a really clean, neutral meal. The perfect hangover meal. If you've always got some of this lying around, you'll always have some protein handy.
Oatmeal is so easy to work with, and has such a nice balance of protein, carbs and fats built into the oats, that it makes a great breakfast, as well as a great evening snack. There's no real point in using instant oatmeal, because it doesn't have much nutritional value, and doesn't really save that much time. Just regular oats are super quick, and fine-cut oats are even faster. With any oats you have, all you have to do to cook them perfectly is make sure they're covered, bring them to a boil, cut the heat, and let them sit there 'til they're cool enough to eat. By that time, they'll be perfectly cooked. Use twice as much water as you have oats. A cup of oats is enough for one meal. Add a tiny amount of salt at the beginning. While it's coming to a boil, add raisins, nuts and some chopped-up fruit if you have it. But even if you can't add anything, it's still good. To make it ultra deluxe, stir in a bit of sugar and a bit of coconut oil, after you've cut the heat, before it's started cooling off.
Eggs are the quickest protein you can find, and it's easy to make them taste great. Heat them up in whatever way is easiest for you. But if you chuck a few eggs in a pan, break the yolks, and grate some veggies, like sweet potatoes, yams or greens, over top of the eggs. Then later on you can fold the eggs over and you've basically got a lazy-person's omelette. Dash of salt at the beginning, pepper too if you have it, basil's great, and yeah, any finely-chopped stuff you can add to it.
Whether you're working with a campsite fire pit, a community kitchen at a drop-in, or a ghetto kitchenette in a rooming house, these three foods can tie your days together, and bracket those big mid-day soup kitchen meals with a little home cooking.
If you do start doing breakfasts at home, you'll end up wanting to do coffee, too. So here's a little bonus tip for making yourself great coffee for free: Used espresso grounds from coffee shops. You know the little puck-shaped things that they throw out after making espresso out of them? Get about five of those and you can boil up an amazing pot of coffee. Like, a whole pot. So like, three big cups. And it's way better than soup kitchen coffee. Just bring your water to a boil, add the coffee, be prepared for it to boil over, so maybe put the pot in the sink when you're adding the coffee, and stir it in gradually. Then when the coffee's added, put the pot back on the heat, cover it, bring it to a boil, and boil it 'til it stops being foamy. Then either wait for the grains to settle before pouring it into a cup, or use some cheesecloth to strain out the grains as you pour the coffee.
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Poor, artsy Toronto Youth between 16 and 29 years can finally chill: Sketch is back, with meals!
The new space at Artscape Youngplace is finally, finally, finally ready. And they're serving their first lunch this Tuesday, September 22nd.
The map and calendar on this site have been updated with the new information. If you're between 16 and 29, and you need food, check this out. If you're into making art, stick around after lunch.
Sketch can be sketchy, but its food standards have always been ahead of the pack. That's because from sourcing to serving, they're not afraid to integrate and innovate: integrate the community and innovate to solve problems. So this is an important event for Toronto in terms of food security, but even more so in terms of social change and cultural development.
Meals are an important part of the Sketch program, because they enhance the health of their participants, but they're also critical to enable access to the rest of the programming. Young poor people can't go somewhere to do something unless there's a free meal involved. That's just a fact of life. But Sketch goes beyond that and provides substantial, healthy meals. At least, historically. So only because the food works, and wakes everybody up, then you've got a ton of youth who can engage in a unique artmaking opportunity. That's what brings Sketch beyond this industry that we have of using twenty bucks of funding money to deliver five bucks' worth of food to somebody who's just traveled for an hour to get there, and employ a bunch of people in the process. The Sketch crew actually have an excuse to get paid, beyond the fact that the public is more willing to make money by providing services to the poor, than they are to just give us the money we need to take care of ourselves. Simply put, people who aren't poor don't trust the poor. If they're going to help us out, they want to get something out of it, and they want it to be on their terms, in the form of programs. We use programs to get everything. Programs that cost more than the amount we'd need not to need the programs. But some programs are actually unique, and provide a useful social service while addressing a pressing need.
So it's good to see that Sketch is finally back, with lunch. Hopefully it's good lunch. And dinner.
The map and calendar on this site have been updated with the new information. If you're between 16 and 29, and you need food, check this out. If you're into making art, stick around after lunch.
Sketch can be sketchy, but its food standards have always been ahead of the pack. That's because from sourcing to serving, they're not afraid to integrate and innovate: integrate the community and innovate to solve problems. So this is an important event for Toronto in terms of food security, but even more so in terms of social change and cultural development.
Meals are an important part of the Sketch program, because they enhance the health of their participants, but they're also critical to enable access to the rest of the programming. Young poor people can't go somewhere to do something unless there's a free meal involved. That's just a fact of life. But Sketch goes beyond that and provides substantial, healthy meals. At least, historically. So only because the food works, and wakes everybody up, then you've got a ton of youth who can engage in a unique artmaking opportunity. That's what brings Sketch beyond this industry that we have of using twenty bucks of funding money to deliver five bucks' worth of food to somebody who's just traveled for an hour to get there, and employ a bunch of people in the process. The Sketch crew actually have an excuse to get paid, beyond the fact that the public is more willing to make money by providing services to the poor, than they are to just give us the money we need to take care of ourselves. Simply put, people who aren't poor don't trust the poor. If they're going to help us out, they want to get something out of it, and they want it to be on their terms, in the form of programs. We use programs to get everything. Programs that cost more than the amount we'd need not to need the programs. But some programs are actually unique, and provide a useful social service while addressing a pressing need.
So it's good to see that Sketch is finally back, with lunch. Hopefully it's good lunch. And dinner.
Scott Mission and St. Felix info corrected on the Calendar
So there's this problem these days with Google Calendar, where repeating events are disappearing. If you notice any problems with the calendar, please leave a comment on one of the articles about it.
In this case, Scott Mission's lunch program was missing from the calendar for some period of time. It's unclear when it started.
As for the St. Felix lunch program listing, it was incorrect since St. Felix changed the timing of their lunch program. They shaved a half-hour off of it, and shifted it an hour later, so it starts at noon instead of eleven in the morning, and ends at 1pm instead of 12:25. So you can't use St. Felix to prepare for something that starts at noon anymore, but you don't have to sprint quite as fast to get there in the morning. So if you're doing the Scott Mission / St. Felix crawl, the timing is a bit better.
In this case, Scott Mission's lunch program was missing from the calendar for some period of time. It's unclear when it started.
As for the St. Felix lunch program listing, it was incorrect since St. Felix changed the timing of their lunch program. They shaved a half-hour off of it, and shifted it an hour later, so it starts at noon instead of eleven in the morning, and ends at 1pm instead of 12:25. So you can't use St. Felix to prepare for something that starts at noon anymore, but you don't have to sprint quite as fast to get there in the morning. So if you're doing the Scott Mission / St. Felix crawl, the timing is a bit better.
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