‘Massive’ meal prep yields tasty rewards
Union Gospel Mission gets ready to serve 3,000 Thanksgiving dinners at annual DTES feast
Volunteers have been working tirelessly to prepare for The Union Gospel Mission’s Thanksgiving dinner.
The Downtown Eastside charity’s annual feast is scheduled for Monday from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. as UGM will serve up 3,000 dinners with all the trimmings — turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, dinner rolls — and even pumpkin pie á la mode for dessert.
The amount of food is staggering, which means the food prep is intensive.
“It’s a massive, incredibly massive, job,” said UGM spokesman Jeremy Hunka after Saturday’s turkey carving session. “There were 2,200 pounds of turkey that volunteers sliced up. We had a couple gourmet chefs volunteer, and then we had more than half a dozen students from VCC help out.
“It took several hours for them to get through that.”
Fortunately, by this point, the UGM are veterans of mass meal prep. The charity has been serving Thanksgiving dinners since 1989, and Christmas dinners since its founding in 1940.
The process takes days. On Saturday, it was turkey carving, but on Friday, it was stuffing. And on Sunday, volunteers will prepare the cranberry sauce, peel and mash the potatoes — and decorate the dining room, which includes personalized notes for every guest.
“One of the coolest things that we do for the dining room is we get people who donated to this meal to send in a note on a placemat,” Hunka said, “so that, when people come down and sit down, there will be a personal message on the placemat for the person who’s getting a meal.”
In addition to meals, UGM provides emergency shelter, outreach, career development counselling, education, addiction recovery and more to those struggling with poverty, homelessness and addiction.
Elaine Murray carves up turkey while volunteering on Saturday at the Union Gospel Mission with Thanksgiving preparations in Vancouver.