Crisis Open Christmas 2008

This is the second year I have volunteered at the Crisis Open Christmas in London. Last year, I was dragged in on one of the days to help out in the kitchen, and I was so addicted to the experience that this year, I chose to be a catering assistant for all 4 days I was there.

For those of you unfamiliar with COC, Crisis is a homeless charity which opens up free homeless shelters all around London for a week over Christmas. As well as celebrating Christmas, the centres also provide services from podiatry to library resources to hot showers for homeless guests, in hope that it will help them to start the new year. It is a wonderful, empowering idea, and I am starting to not be able to imagine a Christmas without volunteering there. Feel free to let me drag you along next year if you fancy doing it yourself!

Anyway, onto the food! The job of catering assistants is to help prepare the 3 meals a day served to guests, and the most exciting thing about cooking at COC is that it is a bit like Ready Steady Cook. The charity relies on donations from supermarkets and catering companies for a lot of the food, and you are not really sure what you’d get each day. And then there is the added challenge of preparing 200-250 meals each day to feed all the guests and volunteers!

So what did we manage to make? The first 2 days, we actually had deliveries of lots of fresh meat and vegetables, and respectively made a beef stew and Thai chicken curry. However, on the 3rd and 4th nights, there was much more of a challenge. The charity was seriously low on fresh food, and unfortunately, supermarkets had the tendency to donate a lot of ready meals. We made the best of it though – for example, we took apart a chicken saltimbocca with risotto Air Berlin ready meal to turn it into a chicken and mashed potato pie, saving the risotto to be served on another day. The food is certainly not gourmet, but it fed lots of cold and hungry mouths. Here is the beef stew, pasta, with a lot of mushrooms we had on the first day (I was way too exhausted to take photos after that! Haha):

Some highlights from my 4 days there:

1. Peeling and prepping what felt like 500 Brussels sprouts
2. Working with chef Norman, how do you stay so calm?
3. Working with chef Lauren, who works for Gordon Ramsay in LA!
4. The experimental apple crumble with Scottish shortbread topping, will definitely try that again