Every Fall, Willing Hands collaborates with local orchards and a cadre of volunteer gleaners, to bring in a harvest of apples for food pantries, community dinners, and other organizations that distribute needed food. Tons of apples are collected; some are put in cold storage for later use. This year, when a portion of those apples developed soft spots a new project was born – applesauce-making!
Volunteers picked up sacks of cold storage apples and took them home to cook.
A team of applesauce makers then finished the processing of all those cooked apples. The LISTEN Community Dinner site offered their commercial kitchen for the project and over 85 quarts of applesauce were made.
The Listen Community Dinner site has been serving fresh applesauce all this week and additional quarts have been delivered to many Willing Hands distribution sites. What a wonderful collaboration for reducing food waste and feeding hungry people local food in March! (Thanks to Frank Easton for most of these photos.)
