Ready, steady… Karma
MAGGIE ALDERSON
The volunteer cooks at this St Leonards-based community kitchen have a fresh challenge each week, making 70 lunches from entirely random batches of donated food.
We’ve all had those evenings, staring into the fridge wondering what we can sling together for dinner… so spare a thought for the cooks who volunteer every week at Karmabank community kitchen, who don’t know what they’ll be working with until the morning of each lunch – but do know that 70 hungry diners will be arriving from 1pm.
A mixture of fresh fruit and veg with packaged goods, all the food is surplus donated by local supermarkets, retailers and growers, which otherwise would go to landfill.
It’s a fantastic initiative, which has already saved 56 tonnes of food from going to the dump (and consequently saved the atmosphere from 3,640 tonnes of methane) – but the nature of the donations means an entirely random selection turns up each week.
Taking the challenge are volunteer cooks, Rikki Finegold, with a background in catering on film and TV sets and James Bennett, who trained at the esteemed Irish cookery school Ballymaloe, after a career in tech.
“James and I get a delivery note on the Wednesday before,” says Rikki, “and we have a chat to plan, then we see what else turns up on Thursday morning, at 10.15.
“We have to go with what we get. If there are loads of mushrooms, we’ll make a creamy mushroom sauce for pasta, or mushroom soup as a starter. If coconut milk turns up, we make Thai curry…”
“We love the challenge,” says James, “it’s a huge buzz, and everyone mucks in. The meals are mostly vegetarian, so there’s a lot of peeling and chopping to do.”
Rikki says James is a particular whizz with desserts – and I have seen him myself, faced with gallons of custard, transform it into a hot chocolate sauce with the addition of a tub of drinking chocolate. It was perfect over slices of donated sponge cake – and there was a room full of very happy lunchers.
If you would like to support this excellent project, you can make a donation on this website, specifying it is for the Hastings community kitchen karmabank.co
You can follow the group on Instagram @karmabankhastings and Facebook karmabankhastings
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