Busy day at the Soup Kitchen. Jacquie was in the kitchen all day(2 shifts), Nishy was on tea duties. Lunch was chicken, mashed potatoes and vegetables or vegetarian sausages with potatoes and vegetables. Dessert was cake and other custard. Meal was much appreciated by the clients.

Mohamed, Sevan and Kash stayed at the Soup Kitchen after completing the earlier prep. They stayed at the tables at the back, swapping sorting the food donations for sorting the donated clothes. Steph came over before 6 pm to join the team.

Emma assigned Steph to be the kitchen helper, who carried the freshly cooked meals to the takeaway table. He quickly advanced through the catering career ladder, first moving on to assembling the meals and ultimately becoming the chef and cooking pasta. Steph's The kitchen produced today 110 beef bolognese pasta meals and 20 veggie options with tomato sauce.

Steph should have earned an extra good deed for his initiative to save two belts he salvaged from his recent mission for Ms Y. He had helped the older lady declutter her flat and rescued two belts that otherwise would have been thrown away - thanks to Steph they ended up as donations to Soup Kitchen!

When all the donated outfits had been labelled, Emma decided to give Sevan and Kash a more challenging task: sorting all the toiletries, and then sorting and testing the marker pens and discarding the ones that were no longer usable. While on the task, the GoodGymers made an exciting discovery: the pink pens had a distinctively sweet smell!

The night finished with tidying up the tables and Steph being given the honour of packing up The Cupboard of Doom™. It was the last GoodGym Ealing session that concluded year 2024!

Kash, Mohamed and Sevan arrived at Ealing Soup Kitchen in time to finish unloading the City Harvest van that was sitting outside. Looking at the delivery, there were a few things that stood out. Big bags of Brussel sprouts, teeny tiny pears, lots of eggs and many crates of fruit.

As usual, the aim of the prep shift was to unpack all of the food, then, from whatever the Soup Kitchen receives that day, creating snack bags for snacking and grocery bags for clients to cook with. The team started by separating out bags of easy peelers and bunches of bananas into single fruits. The food that comes to Soup Kitchen is often on the edge of being not sellable and so it was with the bananas. 2 boxes were fine, while the third was filled with mushy, brown bad 'nanas, some of which had split open.

Kash and Mohamed moved on to creating boxes of 6 eggs from large trays, coming up with innovative ways to make lids for the egg boxes from other bits of food packaging. There was endless cutting of egg trays and packing, then working out how to hold the makeshift egg boxes together.

"Genius" - Emma, task owner

Sevan, on the other hand, still had his hands full of fruit after moving onto filling the snack bags for today's clients. Normally, the snack bags contain 1 drink, 1 piece of fruit and 3 snacks like bags of crisps or protein bars. Today, there was so much fruit that the proportions flipped, with 1 drink, 1 bag of crisps and then a bunch of (sometimes squidgy) bananas, a handful of easy peelers and 2 apples. Very healthy 🍌🍊🍌🍎🍊🍌🍊🍊🍌🍎🍊🍌

Together, the volunteers put together 100 snack bags and 80 grocery bags. Even so, that still left plenty of bananas and carrots sitting around, so everyone was encouraged to take home as many as they wanted to stop them going to waste. There'll be a lot of banana breads and carrot cakes being baked this week 🍰

No rest for the wicked andJacquie was back at ESK this Friday. It was much quieter than last week and low key - 12 until 3 with no clothes of food parcels. Angela cooked a tuna pasta bake and Arul did a macaroni cheese with vegetables. Jacquie was in the kitchen helping with cooking then clearing up. Making the sauce for Angela really used Jacquie's arm muscles!

After all great parties, its time to clean up. Todays task lasted til late as many pots and pans to clean, but also the kitchen including the oven etc Steph Ducat was on deck for the cleaning after all the cooking and serving. 5pm and the kicthen was spotless!!!

The Ealing Soup Kitchen party in full swing and everyone was merry. Then 1pm the guests were starting to be restless and wanted to get in the dinning area to enjoy a lovely Christmas lunch. What a feast!!Guests poured in and the kitchen was tested with serving Soup(Cauliflower & Blue Cheese), then Roast Turkey with all its trimmings(roast potatoes, carrots, parsnips, gravy, stuffing, yorkshire puddings, brussels sprouts) or a Quorn Roast with the trimmings for the vegetarian guests. This was topped up with a traditional Xmas pudding. Today was super busy and we think we served nearly 200 guests in total. Then take away was provided to finish off the service. Jacquie, Jp and Steph Ducat did not see the thyme fly. Very happy team who delivered a great Xmas lunch. Merry Xmas to all.