FareShare Melbourne: cooking more meals, Meals for the Mob continues, Dingley farm gathers pace

Cooking more meals for people who need them most

Our Abbotsford chefs and volunteers are well and truly back into the swing of things in our revamped kitchen…

July was an incredible month, with 110,345 meals cooked, the most since well before our redevelopment (since November 2021, in fact). Our chefs and volunteers followed this up by cooking even more free, nutritious meals in August: 117,161 meals, which included an amazing 90,121 single serve meals.

Over the past few months, we have cooked a variety of meals using lamb chops, pork ribs, salmon fillets and duck. Other creative dishes our chefs cooked up using predominantly rescued produce include pork and fennel stew with barley; spinach and ricotta agnolotti with tomato and anchovy sauce, and the ever-popular Mexican beef, beans and rice.

FareShare volunteer Susan lovingly prepares a tasty spinach and ricotta agnolotti meal.
FareShare volunteer Liz adds roast cherry tomatoes to a lamb chops meal with spuds and lentil braise.

New volunteers at FareShare Abbotsford

This increase in meals could only have been made possible with the injection of hundreds of new volunteers joining our regular crews and supporting our chefs in the kitchens. 

This recent influx of volunteers has brought about an energy boost to our charity kitchens and of course the extra hands we need; full credit to the volunteer team. 

Chef Arnel eased these Saturday newbies into the FareShare Abbotsford kitchen with some unboxing of spinach, which added vital nutrition and flavour (to say nothing about colour) to thousands of our free, nutritious meals.

And here’s chef Emma giving 10 new Tuesday evening volunteers a tour around the kitchen, before getting them on the tools. 

We look forward to welcoming more volunteers into the FareShare community as our revamped kitchen continues to build even more momentum. 

Register your interest to volunteer at FareShare Melbourne

FareShare Melbourne hosts its second Meals for the Mob experience

You may have read about our first ever Naarm Meals for the Mob shift in our last Wash Up newsletter. It brought FareShare staff and volunteers together with First Nations representatives from Aborigines Advancement League (AAL), Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (VACCHO) and Oonah Aboriginal Health and Community Services. 

Since then, we have continued connecting with more First Nations communities in Victoria.

Our second Meals for the Mob shift in early September was another resounding success. We welcomed a dozen Flight Centre group volunteers, who were joined by FareShare First Nations Officer Jason Mollenhauer and community members from Aborigines Advancement League.

Together, they prepared 436 Meals for the Mob, which will support First Nations communities across Victoria. On the menu: lamb chops on a lentil braise with broccoli and a spicy tomato sauce. They also chopped 160kgs of pork and nearly 100kgs of vegetables.

Learn more about Meals for the Mob

Kitchen gardens update

Our kitchen garden volunteers have persevered through this long winter, harvesting all manner of vegetables.

Over winter, our kitchen gardens remained busy, harvesting leek, cauliflower, fennel, lemons, broccoli, carrots, Chinese broccoli, parsley, celery, bok choy, and other essential greens. 

In other exciting news, our Dingley site is well on track. 

Sam Taranto from Taranto Farms and Corey Kingdon, our irrigation installer, helped clear vegetation before Slocombes Excavations transformed the dam, mulching decades of overgrowth and restoring the dam walls. Aqua Pro Irrigation then installed the irrigation system, and we’re thrilled with the progress. 

And that’s not all. Our pump house concrete slab has now been poured, marking another significant step forward for our new farm site! 

The dam at our Dingley farm site.
The pump house concrete slab at Dingley.

Our main growing site, Baguley Farm, went up for sale this week. We want to express our deep gratitude to Les Baguley for his unwavering support of FareShare and our garden program. Despite this news, we’re still gearing up for our spring plantings, which are just around the corner. 

Moorabbin has been bustling with activity lately. Clyde Compost delivered over 100 cubic metres of premium compost and topsoil to rejuvenate our beds ahead of the spring planting season. This additional soil will be a huge boost. 

Les Baguley, centre, has been an invaluable supporter of FareShare - thank you for your generosity.

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