Day 04/05: Two Tagines and some Kohlrabi

This year my daughter is volunteering for her first experience of The Gate as a General Volunteer after a taster years ago as a teenager with Dad. She comes home with a compendium of stories and anecdotes that makes me realise just how cut off I am in the kitchen. Last year we were in a Finsbury academy with a small kitchen in the very centre of things and it was easy to be part of the action.

Our hosting Battersea academy/school is huge but then so is our kitchen, that means no line of sight or intimacy with The Gate guests or volunteers to chat with across a counter whilst prepping food, or painful yet funny karaoke to listen to from guests and volunteers.  My diary is kitchen-centric this year and I'll post some true life outcomes in my post of this year.

After the full-on stress and momentum of a Christmas Day kitchen, it was back to "normal" this afternoon (27th) peeling, chopping, dicing and slicing boxes of parsnips, onions and cabbage, oh so much cabbage! I was let loose on the ovens for the first time to roast butternut squash, turnips and kohlrabi as everyone seems to like them and we always run out however much we cook and serve.

We call in a couple of general volunteers who will do all of the washing up today freeing us up to work on just the food prep, this always proves to be a popular task as it's very physical, time flies at the industrial dishwasher and they marvel at just how fast the same trays, pots, pans, ladles and sharp knives move around a kitchen in action.

Today we were preparing meat and vegan tagines, with fantastic fresh ingredients and pulses, root veg, more cabbage and rice sides. The menu offers really healthy choices that are also easy to prepare, cook, store and a popular serve after yesterday's turkey and all the trimmings. The kitchen assistants click into a relaxed working mode at our respective stations with more time and calm to chat and hear each other.

We expect to serve over 200 guests and volunteers tonight, but we don't know how many guests will return to eat as the weather is mild, the shops are open again and some leave the centre to beg or wander returning later. Many guests stay put, hunkering down for a a week of restful sleep, to hang out or to use our wide range of services and entertainment.

Deborah is Chinese and berating herself because she was struggling to boil rice that didn't come out looking like congee, the rice we had was an unknown brand of jasmine rice so it was trial and error on the water volumes and timings. Make a mistake and that's a lot of mushy rice to bin or serve!

Deborah said she only ever uses a rice cooker at home and was very embarrassed that a Chinese kitchen assistant couldn't cook perfect rice every time on demand.

By now the guests will be used to eating three large healthy meals a day, sleeping and thinking better. It is later in the week when the support, advice and medical services can get a lot of work done and progress made with well-fed guests. We have a doctor and dentist at the centre this year, the size of the academy allows for sterile spaces to be setup, last year we had to transport guests to another centre for medical services. TB is on the return to the UK, so one of our sites will have a mobile X-Ray machine available for guests diagnosed with possible symptoms.

As we approached the end of our shift, an 10:45pm handover, the kitchen wasn't in best shape so we stayed on extra time to tidy, clean, scrub and disinfect the floors, stations and ovens or packing up and labelling pre-cooked or prepped food "Use By" labels . It's unfair the overnight shift should tidy up after us and it's right the kitchen be reset for them.

The overnight shift has a lot smaller headcount of kitchen volunteers and can best use their time feeding the night owls and returning guests with what we leave for them before they move on to the same for tomorrow's morning shift in the wee hours of 27th December.




Busted, a late night visitor to The Gate that reminds me of Vince The Fox!

My daughter and I leave The Gate by 11:30pm to walk home swapping stories of guests and volunteers seen and experienced from our different perspectives.

Wow, it felt like stories from One Thousand and One Nights by the time we opened the front door!













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NB: These diary entries are written as a thank-you to everyone who has donated to Crisis, or would still like to. I write this diary to let you know how we spend your money and to encourage you to keep supporting Crisis as it depends upon your donations or volunteering to fund the huge Christmas operation and year round services -  https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/llct2018

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