Image Credit: CFJC Today / Kent Simmonds

By Jill Sperling

Food Kits

Mount Paul Food Centre, Farm2Chefs selling meal kits to support kids programming

Jan 28, 2021 | 3:21 PM

KAMLOOPS — The Mount Paul Community Food Centre has been providing once-a-month meal kits for children since June of last year.

The kits provide ingredients at no cost to families in need and offer an education in food preparation. The kits have been extremely popular and the centre has come up with a way to help fund these meals by partnering with Farm2Chefs to offer up a series of meal kits for purchase.

The Meal Good Kits will help support the cost of the centre’s kid’s recipe kits, which have been in high demand.

“Yesterday, we had 175 kits leave the Food Centre, which is a record for us,” said Christina Garrett, Food Access Coordinator with the Mount Paul Community Food Centre. “Fifty of those were through Unplug and Play (Family Literacy Week). The rest are general registrations. This month, we’ve also offered our meal kits as a subscription, so people can register and pay for some kits, freeing some kits for other families that might not be able to afford them.”

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The Meal Good Kits are available as a subscription or on-time purchase.

“The money we can raise through the Meal Good Kit not only supports other local businesses and introduces people to different culinary ingredients that they might not have had before, or businesses that they might not have known about,” Garrett said. “That money will directly go into our kids recipe kits, meaning we can offer more and a different variety.”

The Meal Good Kits are curated by President of Farm2Chefs Jared Summers. His goal has been to provide mostly local ingredients within the kits.

“It’s the middle of winter, so vegetable availability, for instance, is pretty limited,” he said, “but we’re able to get some spaghetti squash and some sunchokes from SOL Gardens, we’re able to use honey from Honey + Hive. We’re able to get some fresh beef from Reiner Custom Cutting, which TRU culinary arts is helping to sort of process for us. That’s really the goal is using as much local ingredients as possible.”

February’s meal kit will be available for pick-up on Feb. 10.

“This one is going to be a sous vide beef chuck roll,” Summers said. “It’s going to be slow-cooked and really nice and tender. It’s going to be served with a stuffed spaghetti squash. We’ve got a salad of some kind of winter greens, sunchoke chips, goat cheese crumble, honey lemon dressing with that and then we’re also doing a cheesecake as well.”

The deadline to register for the meal kit is Feb. 3.