Recipe ideas for a lunch club.

tryingtobethrifty

We have started a foodbank in our town which is getting used more and more each week.

As the volunteers have been listening to the stories they have suggested that we start up a lunch club so people can come and get a hot meal, starting most likely in the school holidays when kids don't have access to free school meals and then take it from there.

What I'm trying to do is put together a proposal which includes prices of meals etc. I've had a few ideas such as soup and sandwiches or pasta dishes but was wondering if anyone had any other meal ideas (cheap and able to multiply up easily) or any experience of starting a lunch club.

Thanks for your help.:)

RAS

I suspect that you are going to have to be flexible and inventive, depending very much on what stores you get in and what need using quickly.

Soups would allow you to accept veggies with short shelf lives, or gifts from local allotment holders or mis-shapen stuff from growers. So a raft of good flexible recipes would be a good idea.

But that might not be so great if you have no bread that week.

Some thoughts on this -

1. You can combine chopped raw potato with another veg (celery, parsnip, leek, onion etc) and blitz them in liquidisers so they only take a short time to cook.

2. You can roast a mixed selection of chopped root veggies so they develop more flavour and then liquidise or use hand-held stick blenders. Tomatos and peppers work as well but avoid too much parsnip. This allows you to use up a mixed selection of ropey veggies but uses more fuel.

Or you could mix the roast veggies into a pasta sauce.

3. Dried peas are very cheap and good protein either added to soups or as the main item once in a while.

4. Minestrone also hides a multitude of mixed veggies and bits and bobs of pasta.

Budget range pasta is about 6p per portion and a basic tomato plus free veggie sauce could be made for another 7p.

Once in a while you could use the same ingredients to make a basic dahl and a veggie curry to serve with rice (or get someone from the local sikh temple to teach you how to make flatbreads).

When you get free fruit, consider make crumble; easier than pastry.

hauxwell

At one of the local food drop ins near me they always provide some kind of veggie soup, often with lentils or beans. They either pop some bread out or make croutons from stale bread. Its really simple and people seem to appreciate it.

tryingtobethrifty

Thanks for the replies. It seemed like an easy enough idea but when I sat down to sort it all out I got a bit overwhelmed.

PasturesNew

If you're overwhelmed, keep it simple. Just do a veggie soup and two slices of cheapo shop-bought sliced loaf.

Get an idea of numbers that'll turn up. Find out what they'd like/not like.

Better to do it and do it well with one simple dish, than to try everything to everybody and crash and burn ..... then find out only 2 people come.

laura_hoggle

Have a look at the recipes on the blog 'A Girl Called Jack'. They are all very budget conscious and I'm sure a lot of them could easily be made into bigger batches.

Here's a link to the recipes section: http://agirlcalledjack.com/category/below-the-line-budget-recipes/page/2/

Good luck, it's such a great idea!

mineallmine

Another vote for vegetable soup here.

You could serve with bread (Jamie Oliver did some interesting crouton things the other day). Or with Naan bread. Or wraps.

You could freeze any batches of rolls received and warm them up on the day.

I don't have a vegetable soup recipe. I only make onion soup and also tomato soup. Both of these are handy if you're lucky enough to have a huge batch of either.

Best of luck and well done you on helping in this way.

-taff

soup and dumplings, the dumplings will thicken the soup.
any kind of stew and bread/dumplings
ask the local butcher if he could spare some suet....