Teen's cookbook to help Bayfield food bank cover moving costs

While working as a volunteer stocking shelves at the Bayfield Area Food Bank, 15-year-old Sam Robinson began to notice some of the clients weren't entirely sure of what to do with some of the food items they were getting.

"I would hear a lot of people say they didn't want to take certain ingredients, like chick peas, because they didn't know how to use them," said Robinson.

The food bank serves about 200 clients a month with visitors from Bayfield and nearby communities all over Huron County. Visits are growing by about 10 per cent each month, according to the food bank.

Many who come to the monthly pickup days are families with young children but seniors make up about 30 per cent of visitors.

Robinson said he wanted to include recipes that can be made quickly with plenty of leftovers. At first, his idea was to put the recipes on index cards for the clients to take home.

Then, after talking with his mother Heather, they came up with the idea of gathering the recipes together in a book.

The book approach had a few upsides. It could be a resource for clients, but it could also be used to raise money for the food bank. To help cover printing and promotion costs, Robinson and his mother were able to get a $1,000 grant from the Huron Economic Department.

Robinson reached out to community members in Bayfield, asking them for recipes that would work for the project.

"We definitely got a lot of recipes for tuna casseroles and chili," said Robinson.

The project involved three months of writing, designing the pages and recipe testing.

"We've tried all the recipes and they're delicious," he said.

The result is a handsome bound book called The Clever Cooks Guide, self published through Amazon. Some of the pages include information about the person who donated the recipes.

One recipe for simple biscuits donated by Mark Mitchell incudes a picture of his grandma Ethel Bain. The recipe came to Robinsons in the form of a dog-earned index card. Grandma's first instruction of the recipe is "Wash your hands."

The book was released on May 2 and the goal is to sell 200 copies, enough to donate to each of the food bank's regular clients. The books that aren't donated to food bank clients will sell for $25 each with the proceeds going to help the Bayfield Area Food Bank.

The additional financial donations come at the right time for the food bank. It's currently operating out of three dressing rooms of the Bayfield Community Centre, which houses the town's ice rink.

The food bank moved into the arena last month after the lease at their previous location expired.

The Municipality of Bluewater has a space for the food bank's new home in a nearby property owned by the municipality. It will be offered at a nominal rent. The challenge is, the space requires $100,000 worth of worth of upgrades and retrofits, money the food bank will have to raise.

Meanwhile, the food bank has to be out of the dressing rooms by the time the ice goes into the arena in early September.

"Our numbers are really going up," said Laurie Hazzard a board member of the food bank. "We expect by Christmas we'll be well over 200 clients."

Hazzard said the search for a new location has been tricky. Real estate is expensive in Bayfield and they need a location that's centrally located so clients can walk to get their food. However, they also don't want a location on a main strip or other conspicuous location.

"About 30 per cent of our clients are seniors and there's just a stigma that's attached with going to the food banks," said Hazzard. "We want to protect the integrity of our clients."

With a nod to Sam's cookbook project, Hazzard is encouraged by how the community has come together to help.

"When community members step up like that, it really does help us out," she said.