Miss Dish recently had the great honor of being a judge
at a contest held at the Oregon Food Bank warehouse in Northeast
Portland. The Black Box contest gathers some of the city's
best chefs, gives them a box of typical food-bank fare and
demands they come up with easy recipes using their special
ingredients.
As one of seven judges, I tasted each of the dishes prepared
by the likes of William Henry, chef/owner of William's on
12th, Pascal Sauton, executive chef of RiverPlace Hotel,
David Gee of Provvista Specialty Foods and six other chefs.
Each box was different, as are most relief boxes given out
by agencies.
It was a blind tasting, and judges were asked to evaluate:
1) Ease of Preparation: Many low-income people do not own
fancy equipment or even decent knives; can they pull this
off?
2) Creativity of Recipe: Is its use of the food-box ingredients
innovative, but not too intimidating?
3) Presentation
4) Taste
5) The Kid Factor: More than 40 percent of food-box recipients
are children under 17. Would they like this?
Miss Dish sampled a snazzy barbecue chicken enchilada with
herb rice and tomato-cucumber salsa, a beef-cheddar casserole
that tasted like the Hamburger Helper from back in the day,
tasty Mexican lasagna and scrumptious fish tacos. But the
winner was the lucky lad who got some salmon in his box--the
food bank gets its hands on fish picked up by boats searching
for other seafood, which divert the dead fish to the food
bank instead of throwing them back like they used to. David
Provvista's Gee pan-seared some salmon, fried up some potatoes
and took home the grand prize.
Some things Miss Dish would like to let her gentle readers
to know:
1) Don't donate weird food you would never eat to the food
bank; poor people don't like 10-year-old cans of creamed
onions any more than you do.
2) Many supermarkets that used to donate dented cans and
scuffed foods now sell them off to stores that specifically
merchandise that stuff; help make up the difference at www.oregonfoodbank.org
or 282-0555.
3) The food bank donates all the really gross, out-of-date
food that it can't use to a pig farmer who has created a
way to crush the cans and jars, take the slop out and feed
it to the pigs and then recycle all the containers. This
saves the Bank loads on waste removal and makes the pigs
happy. Cool.
|
