A Place at the Table

We are starting to collect recipes for our cookbook (part 2 of the After the Harvest Grant).

Requirements include:

• 6 ingredients or less (doesn’t include salt or pepper)
• Produce grown in Southwest Idaho
• The main ingredient needs to be the produce (No recipes for pot roasts please) Continue reading →

Fed by Faith was our Vacation Bible School (VBS) theme at Trinity this summer.  I am thankful I was late, an unusual occurrence, to this year’s planning meeting.  By the time I arrived our leaders had already decided they wanted to have food be a focus, ending each session with a family meal.  This idea was inspired by the film A Place at the Table which many of us had seen at the Egyptian Theater in Boise last spring.  One of the film’s theses is that hunger and obesity in the United States are two sides of the same coin.  A great vignette in the documentary is a teacher in a Southeast inner-city grade school who brings a melon to her classroom and gives each student a bite.  She then encourages her students to find the same kind of melon in the grocery store and ask their mom or dad to purchase one. Continue reading →

I never went on a church campout as a kid.  I went to camp—private camp, YMCA camp, church camp.  Adding the “ing” to go camping meant hiking or paddling into the forest and sleeping in a tent or under the stars for several nights.  I certainly knew about pop-up campers and RVs.  I grew up the daughter of the Chamber of Commerce director in a tourist town.  I could have told you not only the five reasons you should stay in Custer instead of any other town in the Black Hills, but which campgrounds around Custer were the best for your family’s particular needs.  But I had never been on a campout until I came to Idaho.  Trinity Lutheran Church in Nampa has a steady history of church campouts and Southwest Idaho has some beautiful state parks, so last weekend I joined 40 people of all ages on the annual campout, sleeping in a tent. Continue reading →