Feel Good Friday - The Town Kitchen

It's been two months since I posted a Feel Good Friday story about Oakland so it's about time I told you another tale from the Town.

The Town Kitchen is "a community-driven food company that employs and trains our youth by delivering chef-crafted meals to corporate clients." 

Founded in 2015 by Sabrina Mutukisna and Jefferson Sevilla, the Town Kitchen provides underserved youth (ages 16-24) with fair-wage jobs, healthcare and job training programs. About half the employees are foster youth. That's important because Only 50% of children in the foster care system finish high school, making it harder to find employment, and 20% will experience homelessness during their first year on their own.

The Town Kitchen is located in East Oakland and 75% of employees live in the community. When they deliver meals in the wider Bay Area, it gives them increased responsibility beyond the kitchen and exposure to corporate environments. When they first started, the Town Kitchen was delivering 20-30 meals a week, now they deliver 700 - 2,000 meals a day!

Get a glimpse inside the kitchen with Chef Sevilla and the employees in this short video.

If you'd like to support the work of the Town Kitchen you have many delicious options. Go to the website to order lunch for your office or fill out this form to book catering for your next event. You can also show the social media love by liking their Facebook page and following them on Twitter @TheTownKitchen.

Feel Good Friday - ChopChop Magazine

It's Feel Good Friday! Who's hungry besides me?

Before you go out and order a burger with pink slime or a sandwich with bread made from yoga mats,  let me introduce you to ChopChop Magazine.

The quarterly magazine (published in both English and Spanish) promotes the mission of ChopChop Kids, "an innovative non-profit organization whose mission is to inspire and teach kids to cook real food with their families." As they continue to explain on their website, "we believe that cooking and eating together as a family is a vital step in resolving the obesity and hunger epidemics."

The magazine "is filled with nutritious, great-tasting, ethnically diverse, and inexpensive recipes. It also has fun food facts, games and puzzles, and interviews with healthy heroes ranging from kid chefs to professional athletes to the White House Chefs."

Great if you have kids or the attention span of a kid when trying to follow a recipe! I'm no French chef but am convinced even I can make these dishes.

While ChopChop is distributed at public schools, children's hospitals and health centers, you can also subscribe or read their content online.

To learn more about Sally Sampson and the creation of ChopChop three years ago, you can click this link to an article about people making a difference.

To stay aware of the latest awards, recipes and news, like their Facebook page. Yum!

Feel Good Friday - Wonderbag

Last week, we talked about Wello, a system for transporting large quantities of water in a rolling barrel, rather than in a container on the top of your head. My guess is, if you're reading this, your water comes out of a tap from every sink in your house.


This Feel Good Friday, I want to talk about something that can benefit everyone - the Wonderbag!

What's so wonderful about this bag? As explained on their website, "The Wonderbag is a non-electric, heat-retention cooker that allows food that has been brought to a boil, to continue cooking after it has been removed from the fuel source." An old concept, but one that Sarah Collins, modernized to help women in her home country of South Africa.

For women using the Wonderbag it means they need less wood, gas or paraffin to cook their meals, saving them time and money gathering fuel and reducing the smoke in their home. Plus, these women spend less time watching their pots boil, giving them more time for childcare and other activities. For you, it means slow cooking a meal and being able to leave the house without worrying you're going to burn it down.

The visual and impatient among us will appreciate this video, which gives an excellent summary in less than two minutes. Those of you who like your news a little more in depth can read this recent article from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Best of all, for every Wonderbag sold in the US, one is donated to a family in Africa! You can order one on Amazon right now. If you're unsure what to cook, you can check the Wonderbag recipe page. All that and a Facebook page too.

Will you be the first on your block to own a Wonderbag?