First Cook in the New Kitchen!

First time pulling ingredients out of the fridge!

On a beautiful Halloween Day, Cooking for the Crowd fired up the kitchen, housed in the East Dallas Christian Church for the first time. The client? Saint Patrick's Refugee Outreach Program, a long-standing nonprofit in Dallas committed to serving asylum seekers who need support navigating a new country. The menu would be egg casseroles filled with pico de gallo, sausage, cheese, and sour cream.

But first things first, check out all the brand new cookware and utensils at Cooking for the Crowd donors purchased at Taste and Toast, held earlier in the summer. Pots, pans, shiny new colanders, a meat slicer, shelving, carts, trash cans, cutting boards, knives, the list goes on and on!

Original CftC board member, Bridget, got busy alongside Elizabeth, cracking eggs, mixing, pouring and doing their best to figure out how to best utilize the new kitchen space.

In the end, a great success! The egg casseroles fed hundreds of people and were made with so much love. Cooking for the Crowd was founded with the simple premise: Love, respect and dignity are foundational to human potential and the fact that small non-profit organizations inefficiently spend much of their time and resources feeding the people they serve, regardless of their actual mission. This essay shares Cooking for the Crowd's mission: to take cooking off Refugee Outreach's plate so they can focus on their mission!

May it be so!

Photos and story by Sarah Jane Semrad.