Toward the end of the night, a patron of the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless said it’s bittersweet when volunteer kitchen manager Mark Biggers makes a meal — the food was always good, but, the man said, it was making him fat.
That’s an end-all compliment if you saw what Biggers and a team of 10 volunteers had made the meal from and how it was made.
The dinner shift began a little after 4 p.m. and Volunteer Program Manager Tiffany Stamas leads me on a tour of the shelter. The doors are locked during the day and already a dozen or so homeless people line the building. The shelter can take in about 160 people per night. Still, when the shelter meets capacity anywhere from zero to 40 are turned away and given a bus pass and sent to a partnering shelter in the city.
In the men’s dorm, there are about 70 bunks crammed into a large, open room; blue vinyl mattresses on spring bed frames. There’s a doctor that makes weekly visits to screen for tuberculosis and STDs, and provide first aid and general health care. There’s a little pharmacy where patrons can buy sundries like soap, aspirin and laundry detergent. The shelter has a phone line that potential employers can call so that patrons can receive messages without having to worry about the word “homeless” being attached to their resume.
There’s a big atrium and a recreation room with a TV. Lights out at 10 p.m., lights on at 6 a.m. Dinner at 6:30 p.m., breakfast at 6:30 a.m. Volunteers make every meal at the shelter, and tonight, Biggers, a retired engineer with no professional kitchen experience, leads a team from the Boulder Valley Unitarian Universalist church and one dude from Boulder Weekly.
About 90,000 meals are prepared each year at the shelter, and tonight, about 160 of those meals are pizza and pasta. Biggers, one of about a dozen people who volunteer as lead kitchen manager — the head chef so to speak — immediately gets us working.
The first things we get going are the tomato sauce and the apples. I open about 40 cans of tomato — diced tomatoes, crushed tomatoes, tomato sauce, roasted chunk tomatoes, whatever’s there. Different brands, different consistencies, different expiration dates; they all go in. Biggers adds in about two cups of oregano from an unmarked bag, a heap of salt and pepper, some garlic cloves, onion and grated cheese.
Meanwhile, a team of three volunteers starts peeling and cubing Granny Smith apples for the parfait. Biggers says the patrons at the shelter don’t always get a fresh dessert, so he likes to make it a point to make one every shift he works — even if that means bringing in his own ingredients.
In fact, that’s the obvious challenge of catering a 160-person dinner with a pantry that will be stocked week to week with completely different things. The shelter gets most of its food from the community food share program and also takes in fresh and canned food donations, but not knowing exactly what food will come in, the kitchen staff improvises.
“We get volunteers and community members who drop things off on any given day that we don’t expect,” Stamas says. “So say we get some fresh produce come through the door — and there’s really nothing better we can get than fresh, beautiful produce — then we can modify the menu, and we don’t have to used canned green beans.”
Stamas says the full-time kitchen manager, Marybeth Bannon, “very innovatively and creatively improvises” meals on a weekly basis depending on what comes through the door.
Back in the kitchen, Biggers has me sweating over the grill, chopping and flipping some chicken parts into cubes. There’s not enough time in the day to fully defrost the chicken, so Biggers throws a 12-pack of filets meat-down on the grill when we can’t get the wrapping underneath off, then about ten minutes later, tussles with the wrapping until it finally concedes.
There’s a lot of resourcefulness like that going around. Volunteer Millie Montgomery cuts the bad spots and mold out of donated bell peppers. We use at least three different kinds of goat cheese from various donors to top the pizzas.
Biggers says he’s used the experience of getting random shipments to be able to develop a catalog of recipes specific to the shelter.
“One year they got a shipment of 1,200 pounds of catfish filets so we had catfish a lot of times. It’s a lot of what do we have a lot of, what don’t we have a lot of, and based upon that I go ahead and plan a meal, and because I’ve been doing it for five years, I’ve got a big, thick recipe book,” Bigger says.
Biggers even uses volunteers resourcefully. Somehow, our group of 10 that have rarely, if ever, worked in a kitchen before are all busy for three straight hours. No one is standing around, everyone seems to know what everyone else is doing, and there’s beautiful synergy and cooperation amongst the team. It seems effortless, but Biggers says it was difficult when he first started volunteering five years ago to get the most out of volunteers.
“The most challenging part, particularly at the beginning, is not knowing how much the volunteers can do and how much you can push them,” Biggers says. “Part of that is just trying to help people, breaking up the things. You can kind of plan ahead.
“Like you were talking to Millie…” Whoops. “You have to remind people sometimes that we’ve got a lot of slicing and dicing to do and generally people are OK with it.
“The difficult thing is not knowing the ability and willingness to work hard of the folks that come in,” Biggers says.
Biggers now has me stirring a vat of caramel he brought from home and the chopped apples from before over the stove. To my left is the bubbling cauldron of red sauce, behind me a volunteer is slicing mushrooms, and now big rectangles of pizza on giant metal sheets are being prepped to go into the 500-degree oven. Out in the service area, a young volunteer arranges lettuce in a bin, other people are pouring milk and water into a menagerie of coffee mugs, while others are now in the back cleaning off pots, pans and trays.
Some of the patrons of the homeless shelter start to line up outside the closed dining room door, while others are helping out in the kitchen. About 60 shelter patrons participate in a betterment program that provides guaranteed housing for nine months while they do several chores around the facility. Today, two patrons help clean dishes, but Stamas says homeless patrons also serve dinner three nights a week at the shelter.
At mealtime, the guests shuffle in, and I’m on the line serving pizza. Patrons pick up a metal tray and some pasta is plopped down first. Then they get the choice of meat or vegetarian pizza, then down to the salad bar. Then they can pick up a cup of Biggers’ apple parfait (apple cubes, caramel, graham cracker crumbs and whipped cream) and a mug of milk.
Some people are enthusiastic and happy. Some are quiet and grateful. Some are out of it. Some are tired. Some are silent. Some are white, some are Hispanic and some are black. Some are old and some are young. Tall and short, handicapped, full smiles and cracked teeth, warm sweaters and tattered t-shirts. It’s clear why folks volunteer here, and why Biggers and the other volunteer kitchen leaders meticulously plan meals every week, and why after a long day, they want to come and work really hard for four hours, but I ask anyway.
“This group of people, the homeless, these folks are probably one of the most appreciative groups,” Biggers says. “You have people coming by saying, ‘Thank you’ and there’s at least a dozen people every night that come by and make it a point to say, ‘Thank you.’ I worked at the same company for 35 years, and it was really a great company, but there were weeks and weeks that went by without someone saying, ‘Thank you,’ so to get that immediate feedback… It’s fun.”
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