Taking the mystery out of healthy cooking on a budget, the latest community project tackled by folks at the Fallon Food Hub is a cookbook giveaway. three hundred copies of the popular Good and Cheap are being made available at local food pantries.
Last summer during the COVID shutdowns, the Food Hub received a grant to work with the Epworth Food Ministries and the Fallon Youth Club to provide local produce boxes to families who had suffered economic impacts. Throughout the summer and well into November, staff at the Food Hub provided nearly 400 food boxes to local families each week.
When people picked up their food boxes, Kelli Kelly, executive director of the Food Hub often heard that people didn’t want to take a specific item because they didn’t know how to prepare it. “I started doing the little newsletter with recipes and that got me talking to people who work at food pantries or whose organizations run them like New Frontier, Out of Egypt, and the Wolf Center and what people hear a lot is there are things people don’t know how to cook, so they don’t take them, and they take more of the processed food that’s less healthy.”
For instance, she said people never take lentils because they don’t know what to do with them, “which is crazy because lentils are super nutritious, and they are not hard to prepare and they are delicious.” She says there is a barrier to cooking healthy food when you just don’t know how to do it.
The cookbook was created by a woman named Leanne Brown, based on a food stamp budget, using supplemental ingredients that might be commonly found in food pantries. Kelly says the recipes use simple ingredients and are tasty and very easy to prepare.
Using the last of the CARES Act grants funds the Food Hub received through the Nevada Department of Agriculture, Kelly was able to buy the books, 150 written in English and 150 in Spanish.
So far, she has taken boxes of the cookbooks to Out of Egypt and the food pantry at the Wolf Center for people who are interested when they pick up food. The cookbook will also be available at New Frontier, or by emailing the food hub at [email protected] Additionally a PDF version is available for free download at https://www.leannebrown.com/good-and-cheap.pdf
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