Cookbook will help North Smithfield pantry clients get cooking - Valley Breeze

Cookbook will help North Smithfield pantry clients get cooking - Valley Breeze

11/30/2016

Melody Fontaine holds one of 75 copies of a cookbook she created to help those who rely on food from the North Smithfield Food Pantry as a project to earn her Girl Scout Silver Award. (Breeze photo by Sandy Seoane)

Girl Scout creates and donates unique publication

NORTH SMITHFIELD – At the North Smithfield Food Pantry in the basement of Slatersville Congregational Church, those in need of a meal will find many varieties of packaged foods, from canned chicken and green beans, to boxed rice, pancake mix and mashed potatoes.

Many in town depend on the offerings, donated by residents and local supermarkets, and now, thanks to one Girl Scout, they also have all the information they need to turn the pantry foods into a delicious meal.

Melody Fontaine has published and donated 75 copies of a cookbook designed especially for pantry recipients, with more than 40 recipes modified to use ingredients found on church basement shelves.

“I always liked cooking, so I started out there,” Fontaine said of the project. “Then, I realized there are so many families in the community that receive food here, and they might not know how to prepare it.”

“Everyone deserves to have their own recipe that they love.”

The project has earned Fontaine a Girl Scout Silver Award, a high honor in the scouting system, and one for which she far exceeded the organization’s expectations.

Fontaine began the effort to create her “Helping Hands Cookbook” more than two years ago, and logged 125 hours working on the project for an award with a 50 hour requirement.

She began by touring the pantry to inventory the items handed out four times a month to North Smithfield’s hungry. Then she searched through recipes in one of her mother’s old cookbooks for things that could be adapted.

In most cases, that meant using canned and boxed foods in place of more traditional items.

“It’s tailored to what we have,” noted pantry organizer Jackie Puffer.

But Fontaine did not just publish a few altered recipes. With some help from her mother, Kelly Fontaine, she prepared each and every entrée, dessert, dip, snack and soup, making sure the ideas weren’t just functional, but also tasty. Not everything made the cut.

Fontaine employed a trial and error system, and chose which recipes to publish based on feedback.

“We only had a few nights where we looked at each other and said ‘Pizza?’” Kelly said.

With some – like those using her least favorite ingredients such as canned tuna – she asked others to judge the outcome. She even rated the leftovers to make sure they reheated well.

The work was important Kelly noted, because with the scout’s target audience, “They’re not going to experiment because they don’t have the money to waste.”

Melody also published the book herself, typing up pages, then printing, cutting and binding the document at home.

“The worst was collating,” she said.

She appears to have also made painstaking efforts to ensure that the books were genuinely useful, with features such as “Helping Hands” tips at the bottom of each page offering variations and cooking methods. An index in the back of the book classifies each recipe by the foods they contain, so a visitor who picks up an item at the pantry can easily discover how to use it in a dish.

Fontaine used her babysitting money to purchase the needed binding machine.

And the 125 hours she logged didn’t include much of her activity, from shopping and eating, to clean up.

The resulting cook book contains easy instructions for meals including “pizza pasta,” a “reuben casserole” and chicken chili, along with desserts like apple crumb cake and peach cobbler brownies.

“I created ‘The Helping Hands Cookbook’ to share delicious recipes using foods families will receive from the food pantry,” the publication explains.

The idea, the scout noted, also aims to draw attention to the need to donate food.

“This cookbook was created to bring awareness to our community to help families in need,” the book states.

Fontaine even held a workshop in hopes to teach people how to cook some of the recipes.

And this week, she donated 75 books to the pantry to be handed out to visitors.

“It’s going to help a lot of people,” said Puffer. “We have a lot of people who are single and a lot of them are men and I don’t know that any of them know how to cook.”

“I think they’re going to love it.”