Family Food Educators of Central Oregon

Its Harvest time!  The fall brings bountiful harvest and we’d like to encourage people to eat with the season.  Seasonal fruits and vegetables are more likely to be on sale because they are in abundance in the fields and the grocery stores.  Our local food pantries are getting a lot of dry milk to give out and are hoping that we can give people some recipes to show how to use it in the kitchen.  This month we’ll be making Peanutty African Stew.  We’ll be using the dry milk instead of liquid milk as the recipe calls for.  Its an easy substitute in soups and stews!

We’ll also be having a nutrition ed volunteer meeting in Bend on Thursday October 22nd from 1-2.  Please come and join us plan more ways to reach our community!  Please let me know if you’ll be able to make it and if you want to bring a fun recipe sample to share.

Volunteers,

I’m sorry that we had to cancel our meeting today, I think we’re probably all just too busy for our own good!  I’m glad to have the little piece of each of you that I have though- you are all such great people.  I’m going to plan to reschedule our volunteer meeting for Thursday September 24^th and hope that many of you can make it.  We have something that we could really use your help with.  On the 24^th we are hoping to do the assembly of 83 physical activity binders and bags for our Redmond teachers.  Please come to our Bend office on the 24^th and bring something yummy to share!  Let me know what time of day works for you and we’ll try and be flexible.

Here are a few things I wanted to cover today:

1. We are volunteering at Project Connect on September 19^th.  This is a Central Oregon community event held once a year for low and no income families.  In the past it has been called Project Homeless Connect.  We will have a space where we will be preparing some healthy recipes for people to taste and passing out lost of nutrition education materials.  Dozens of other community resources are there for these families.  Its kinda a one stop shop for community resources.  They will have dental and medical services, veterinary care, legal services, housing and employment resources and much more.  If you are available please join us, we can use all the help we can get.  We usually get to talk to people face to face and really help them make small changes to take better care of their health.  They are expecting between 1500 and 3000 people!  You can show up to the fairgrounds at 8:00 on Saturday Sept 19^th.  We will be in the Middle Sister building on the Deschutes County Fairgrounds in Redmond.  The event goes from 8:40-3:30.  If you want to only volunteer for part of that time, just let me know what works for you.
2. Creating a Pantry and Brown Bag site Cookbook:  please write or type out any recipes that you would like to include in this cookbook.  I’m thinking that those of you who do brown bag sites often that you can type out some of the recipes that you have created on the spot in the past.  Also if some of the recipes you bring could include beans, tomato sauce, or any canned vegetables that would be great.  I want to make sure that they all taste good so if you have one you’re unsure of, we can arrange to fund a trip to Rays to do some recipe testing for our group.  Steve Murray from the Neighbor Impact food bank has mentioned that we may be getting large quantities of dry milk coming into our pantries, so that may be a good item to feature as well.  Once we get all the recipes together, we can put them into our nutrition analysis program and make sure they meet our nutrition guidelines and then figure out a way to incorporate them into a book!
3. We are also working with two volunteers who live in Sun River to see if we can start serving the Sun River and LaPine area pantries/brown bag sites.  Ona, Ann and any other interested volunteers will try and get together to discuss how this can happen.  I’m waiting to hear back from the LaPine brown bag site now.
4. So I was thinking that maybe one of you could host a get together at your place this fall so we could all have some time to get to know each other.   Any willing hosts?  There are about 13 active volunteers right now.
5. Sign up for September events:

• September 12th- Prineville Farmers Market (Mary)
• September 17th- Redmond St Vincent de Paul 10:00-12:00
• September 19th- Project Connect at Redmond Fair Grounds 8:00-3:30 (Carol, Erica and staff)
• September 21st or another monday – Bend Brown Bag 1:30-3:30
• September 24th- Bend St Vincent de Paul 10:00-12:00
• September 24th- Physical Activity bag and binder assembly in Bend- afternoon? (Wendy, Ann, staff)
• September 28th- Bend Salvation Army 1:00-3:00
• September 29th- Bend 7th day Adventist Pantry 10:00-12:00 (Wendy)

Lastly, thank you so much for all your help this summer!  It has flown by and I can’t believe that we are ushering fall in already.  Please leave a comment if you have any input for any of this.  Click on the “Comments” link just below the title of this post “September meeting rescheduled… “, or at the bottom of this post.

It’s time to vote for our September volunteer meeting time.  Please click on the link below and let me know if you can make in on Sept 8th, 9th, or 10th.

September meeting pole

Our August recipe is Personalized Pasta Salad.  Use your creativity on what vegetables you put in.   You might even want to contact the pantry you go to and see what vegetables they have available.  That way your recipe will really match what the clients might be getting.

Extension just launched a neat website with lots of resources for educators.   Take look!  The content focuses on managing our lives in these tough times.

http://mittnet.extension.org/index.php?mode=b&c=3

Six of us met for our July Nutrition Update.  We had a great discussion about the new research coming out about Vitamin D.  We went over a  Dairy Council Handout, and watched a video clip from some experts at Iowa State University Extension.  Vitamin D has moved into the spotlight in the past few years, not only due to the positive affects it seems to have in the body, but because some experts are trying to raise the Recommended Daily Intake (RDI).

What does Vitamin D for us?

New research has been published to show that Vitamin D not only plays a role in keeping our bones strong, but also plays a role in immunity, cancer prevention, cardiovascular health, and even insulin secretion.

Our current recommended intake for children and adults up to age fifty is 200 International Units (IU) per day.  But most health professional are anticipating the recommendation to increase dramatically, due to the host of new research out there.

Where do we get Vitamin D?

We can get some Vitamin D from our diets by eating certain fish, drinking milk, or other Vitamin D fortified foods, but most of us don’t get enough from our diets.  So where do we get the rest?  The sun.  Those of us in the North West can get enough vitamin D by exposing a part of our skin to the sun during the midday hours.  Most experts recommend that we spend 10-15 minutes in the sun between 11am and 2 pm.  Then we can be pretty sure that our body is getting enough.  So all those people telling us to get outside… they’re right!  So lets get outside and play; its good for us in more than one way!

We are still trying to promote whole wheat pasta at our pantry sites.  We’ll be demonstrating how to make

Super Easy LoMein (Super Facil LoMein).

For most sites, it should work best if you cook the pasta ahead of time.

At WIC we are trying to promote “Fresh Choices.”  We’ll be making a few healthy tasty dips that familes can make to serve with fresh vegetables from the grocery store or farmers market.  We’ll be sampling

Farmers Market Salsa (Salsa del Maercado de Agricultores),

and

Quick and Easy Bean Dips (Salsas de Frijoles Rapidos y Faciles).

At our DHS offices we’ll be doing a variety of recipes, so if you choose this demo you can help choose your recipe!

Our Nutrition Education Volunteers are busy folks!  It looks like we are having a hard time finding a day and time that we can all get together.  If you haven’t voted, please click on our “Vote Here-July Meeting Pole” link to throw in your 2 bits.   If we can’t find a time in July, maybe we can do August.  Our Master Food Preservers usually meet the 2nd Thursday of each month so we could combine our meetings as well.  First I’d like to plan a meeting in Bend, because that is where our largest group is located.  Then we can branch out to the smaller groups in Redmond and Prineville.  We have 4 new volunteers who would love to meet all of you lovely veteran volunteers so lets find a date!

Here’s our June recipe for the pantries… One Pan Spaghetti.

Our WIC recipe is… Banana Bobs. But instead of only using bananas, we are using other fresh seasonal fruit, such as strawberries.

Just click on the title and the recipe should open up!

Welcome to our Family Food Educator blog.  I hope that this can be a place where you can bring your thoughts, ask questions, gather information, and find everything you need for our program.  This may also be a place that people outside of our program can come to glean information about health and nutrition.  Our entries will evolve overtime and I would like to invite you to join in and post your comments!

Sincerely,

Jamie Fitch RD

OSU Extension Faculty