Good golly, Feastlings.
This morning was one of those mornings. I got outside on the bike and, as much as I was over the moon that it was actually chilly as I pedaled along, the weird orange sun hiding behind a thin scrim of smoky haze made it feel like there was mottled gauze stretched across the sky, and I’ve been fighting a sad lassitude ever since. It felt like an alien moonscape.
The good news is that we kicked off the day here at Feast with some spirit-lifters: we delivered food to not one but two hospitals, one to the entire staff of Palo Verde Behavioral Health funded primarily by you all, where they graciously stuffed my hands with thank-you notes, donations of their own to future delivery runs, and a kind promise that they’d keep a bed handy for me if I needed it; and the other back to the VA Hospital yet again, that one funded primarily by AARP, who just as graciously chose Feast for their annual Day of Service donation and sent us to, as luck would have it, the Mental Health section of the VA Hospital. So it was Mental Health Day today, and it was more than slightly uplifting feeding the people who are taking care of people suffering from far worse than lassitude and ennui. So thank you, Feastlings, and thank you, AARP, for donating 286 meals today. And we, as is our habit, threw in another 65 meals as our thank you to the community.
The other thing we did was to make more bread and pastries. More rum babas today, and mini Paris-Brest (those rings of pate a choux- you know, the dough for cream puffs and eclairs- piped full of mocha-praline cream. And pumpkin-seed polenta levain, plus some other tasty treats. You can see it all,along with the menu and the other specials, here.
Tomorrow, we won’t exactly start the day with it, but midway through it we’ll be tasting wine via zoom, and there’s still time today and for nearly three hours tomorrow to grab some samples and ready yourself for some fun wine tasting, likely a couple of which will be varietals you haven’t tasted recently, if ever:
And then next week you can kick off the Jewish New Year with something tasty, whether you’re Jewish or not. It’s my firm belief that, just as you don’t have to be a French bicyclist in the early 20th century to appreciate Paris-Brest, you also don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate matzo ball soup. You’ll need to pre-order by next Wednesday to assure yourself any of these treats, but that gives you the better part of a week to decide how you want to begin 5781. I personally plan on a little bit of all of, even if it isn’t kosher:
We’ll also be sending food out to our various delivery hubs next week, but I won’t muddy the waters with those links again until we know what specials we’ll be offering on those days. that said, i’ll note now that if you’ve gotten into the habit of picking up your meals at Catalina Foothills High School or Canyon View Elementary School, we can no longer bring food to those hubs on our customary Friday delivery run, because even though the kids aren’t there, school is back in, so we’ve consolidated both hubs into one single hub at George Mehl Family Foothills Park. Other than that, we’re sticking with the locations we’ve been delivering to in the past.
Thank you, everyone. Here’s to a steadily more normal time.
Your friend,
Doug