The first Cook for a Cause is a huge success!

We had our Cook for a Cause day yesterday, and it was great! We got started at 8 am with the early crew, who were actually early for the first shift, and they were hard-core. You do not want to get in the way of people who sign up to volunteer at 8 am on a Sunday. I thought we might spend that whole first shift prepping ingredients, but they got that out of the way in the first fifteen minutes, and we were off! Here's some of our intrepid morning cooks:


One fun thing was that we got to use all our big pots, which we never use otherwise. (The only reason we have them was because we bought them for cheap at an auction.)


Over the twelve hour cook-a-thon, we had about 70 great volunteers, and it was a lot of fun to cook with everyone! I enjoyed getting to see some of my former class participants again, plus lots of our cafe regulars. With so many hands, we were able to really get up some speed on the prep and assembly of the dishes. Here's the lasagna assembly table during one shift:


Our final tally was about 720 pounds of food that we will donate to the Carpenter's Cupboard food bank in Wheat Ridge. That's almost 900 servings of lasagna with meat sauce, chili, and spaghetti marinara. The great thing is that all of this is nutritious and homemade with high-quality ingredients, and it's going directly to people who really need it. We'd like to thank Sunflower Market, who donated some sausage for the lasagna. I taste-tested lots of batches of our lasagna sauce and chili, and they were really awesome. Despite the fact that I oversaw the preparation of an insane amount of lasagna yesterday, I am actually kind of hungry for lasagna right now, because it was so good. Below are a few more pictures of our fantastic volunteers. Thanks to everyone who helped us celebrate our first anniversary, and we're excited to do this type of event again in the future!

Here's the thank-you note we received from the food bank:

What a wonderful spot Mary and Jill have found to locate their shop! It's not just because it's a busy corner, because they have landed smack in the middle of some of the nicest people in Denver. We propose a minor name change, from 'Generous Servings' to 'Generous People'.

The food prepared by those of you who participated in last Sunday's "Cook-a-thon" has provided The Carpenter's Cupboard with a gourmet array of meals for big families that we are afraid has made us the food bank of choice in the area.

Thank you for the love and support that you showed on that sunny Sunday. God bless you all.