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Giants Ace Matt Cain Visits the POH Kitchen!

Some of you may have heard the buzz that there was a Matt Cain sighting at Project Open Hand last week.  For those of you that are not sports fanatics, Matt is a starting pitcher for the San Francisco Giants.  

As the spokesperson for our upcoming Plate to Plate 5K event in August, he came in to film a TV commercial for Plate to Plate.  He spent most of his time in the kitchen and on the mid-day line.  His first scene took place peeling carrots with Plate to Plate’s two new interns Kari Scheidt and Sarah Hedayati. After reciting some lines for the commercial, Matt, and soon-to-be wife Chelsea, took to the line to help package our hot meals for the afternoon.

It was great to host both Matt & Chelsea at POH. They were so friendly and interested in Project Open Hand’s mission. They weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty and see what it was like to volunteer here.

For those of you that got to meet and/or be filmed volunteering with Matt, congratulations on your 15 minutes of fame!  For those of you that missed it, keep an eye out for this exciting commercial to be aired on Comcast Sports Net.

Posted By: Sarah

Blackout!

  In this modern world, a sudden loss of electricity can really throw us for a loop. In a high-volume food service operation like Open Hand, a power outage has the potential to be catastrophic when you consider how much of our day-to-day operation relies on electricity. We were reminded of this the other day when a transformer vault – I don’t pretend to know what that is – suddenly exploded. Without warning, all power to the building went out on an otherwise quiet Friday morning and if you wandered out onto Polk Street and looked north, you would have seen flames and black smoke shooting up from a manhole (some awesome pics, here).

Meanwhile, back at POH, staff and volunteers were busy making plans to pack meals by hand. A hand-crimping meal-lidder was located so that meals could be packed in foil containers and volunteers gathered to work under the feeble glow of emergency lights. No one complained, they simply put their heads down and got the job done.

Down in the Distribution department, Tim C. and the gang were busy patching together route sheets – a job usually accomplished with computers and printers – cutting and pasting together the guides that volunteers would use to deliver meals to clients. And in a final bit of adventure, appropriate given the days events, drivers managed to outfox a particularly unhelpful meter maid who had blocked access to our street. Defying the meter maids “orders” drivers made an end run to the garage, returning all vehicles to storage before anyone could stop them!

It was a crazy day for all and a challenging day for many and yet, the meals went out, as they always do, with love. We salute our dedicated staff and volunteers who went above and beyond the call for the sake of our mission.

Posted by: Dan

Sweet Stuff

When I was a kid we weren’t allowed to have sugar because it was going to “rot your teeth,” “have you bouncing off the walls,” or “ruin your appetite.”

“Sugar’s” come a long way since then.  Mostly it’s come in the form of high fructose corn syrup which I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, probably because it’s in the media and my level of awareness has been raised http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/high-fructose-corn-syrup.htm , but also because there’s a 3 year old in my house and I look at labels a lot more than I used to. 

This stuff is everywhere!  Especially in things that kids most like to consume, like Ketchup, the favorite condiment of just about everyone under the age of 12.   We try to stay away from the overly process convenience foods where the high fructose corn syrup and other scary ingredients usually hide, but convenience is attractive because we have busy lives and things that take five minutes to cook…well, they take 5 minutes to cook, but that’s sort of another post.

Sugar’s not so bad when you make the choice to eat it, it’s when they sneak it in there and don’t go out of the way to tell you, that’s when it feels like a mean game.  And don’t we have enough to worry about already just keeping little people fed in general?

We’ve been working hard to keep the processed, sugary food out of our kitchen.  A major way we’ve done that at home is signing on with Community Supported Agriculture CSA http://www.localharvest.org/csa/ , we get a box of locally grown organic fruits and veggies delivered once a week at about the same price we’d pay at the store.  We always have a fresh alternative in the house now.   There’s still a box chicken nuggets there, too.  Real change happens slowly, but it does happen.

And if you’re curious about just how much corn may be hidden in your diet, here’s a great documentary http://www.kingcorn.net/

Posted by: Jessica

The Future Food Web

If you have followed this blog at all, you know we are locavores at heart – an easy stance to take in the San Francisco Bay Area – and we have high hopes for a future food system that relies less on industrialization and more on tradition. Wired has an interesting article on the future of food distribution and how small, local farms may benefit from an Internet enabled supply chain. More important than sales may be the impact that the Internet and in particular, social networking sites might play in elevating the profile of local farmers:

 “The potential effect is much bigger than the tons or dollar amounts of food that it impacts because it’s enabling people to know more about where their food comes and rewarding people who are taking those steps,” said Tom Tomich, director of the University of California, Davis Agricultural Sustainability Institute.

You can read the rest of the article, here.

Posted by: Dan

Hooray for Pork Brains!

Or not. Our friend Paul points us to this fascinating review of pork brains in a can, something alleged to be food:

Only a handful of brave souls manned up and faced the brain, though everyone but Chang and Brett opted to go the Brains ’n’ Eggs route rather than eat brains straight from the can. Our courage wavered a bit once the can was popped open to reveal soggy pink chunks floating in a milky pink liquid, accompanied by a smell very akin to cat food and dead tissue.

You can read the rest of the story, here. Beware, the article contains some naughty language and horrifying descriptions of canned pork brains.

Posted by: Dan

Blind Taste: A food blog to rival ours

Our dear Andrew points us to a nifty food blog called, Blind Taste. We’ve been perusing the posts off and on today and liked what we saw especially this post on how to properly pour a beer. Ahh, beer.

Posted by: Dan

No Magic Bullets

As I write this, I’m sipping red wine, nibbling on some dark chocolate and popping Hoodia. I expect to live forever, thin and cancer-free. I’m kidding, of course but it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that each new day seems to bring news of another miracle food, guaranteed to grow hair, shrink bellies and prolong life. Acai is the latest wonder food to be foisted upon us and, as is often the case when it comes to “too good to be true,” the news is exactly that:

There’s some dispute as to whether acai juice has more antioxidants than the juice of other fruits; the Washington-based food industry watchdog group Center for Science in the Public Interest notes that acai is only a middling source of antioxidants, providing more than, say, apple juice, but less than pomegranate or Concord grape juice.

You can read the whole story, here. And to the larger issue, are there short cuts when it comes to nutrition? Well, yes and no, there is probably no single food item that will absolve you of your nutritional transgressions but there are some neat rules of thumb you can follow:

Eat the rainbow – eating fruits and vegetables of every available hue is a good way to ensure that you are receiving the most possible vitamins and nutrients.

Get the white out – which is to say, eat more whole grains and less refined flours. So, swap whole grain pasta for white pasta, whole grain bread for white bread and brown rice for white rice.

Moderation is the key – controlling portion size can be tough and we were all taught to clean our plate. Add in our tendency to eat on the go and you have the makings of an overeating nightmare. Step one is to slooooow down, give your brain time to get the message from your stomach that you are full; it’s just oo easy to eat way past the point of being stuffed.

These are just a few helpful tips and we’ll look to post more over time. Until then, beware of anything that markets itself as a “superfood.” Can it fly? Does it have x-ray vision? No? Then it’s not a super food.

Posted by: Dan

Toward a Sustainable Food System

The Nimans’ are at it again. Today’s post provides the broad-brush outlines of a sustainable (non-industrialized) food system. The article is appealing for its optimism. You can read it, here.

Your Water Footprint?

Okay, okay … we’re mindful of lapsing into finger-wagging when it comes to how to eat (or how not to eat) so make what you will of this:

Good Magazine  has a wonderful graphic that compares the water you use and the water that helped make the thing you used. For instance, it takes 1500 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef, whereas 287 gallons of water is needed to produce a pound of chicken.

Toward a Fossil Fuel-Free World

San Francisco is in the initial stages of building its first biodiesel plant at Pier 92 in the Bayview. Environmentalists and the city’s Planning Board are working together, studying the environmental impact to the surrounding community. Even though ground breaking appears to be a ways off, it’s a step in the right direction. 

The city of San Francisco uses a blend of biodiesel in all of its 1500 diesel vehicles, but the fuel is delivered by rail and truck from as far away as the Midwest. The city would like to get all its fuel from local sources. You can read more about this story, here.