Hammond house is one of the women's shelter in Seattle; it is run by Compass Housing Alliance. We volunteered to make and serve some food for the Christmas lunch at the shelter.
We took two side dishes - masala buns and veggie puffs - and 3 pies - 2 homemade and 1 store bought. If you click on the last link you'll see that veggie puffs is our favorite dish for such events! It's relatively easy to make in bulk and almost a sure-shot crowd pleaser. We did tone down the spices in both the side dishes to suit the residents of the shelter. For the pies we made a Chocolate Satin pie and Key lime pie; we got a pumpkin pie from Costco. It took us quite some time to make all the stuff and I didn't have enough time to get a good picture. So I got what I could. The second pan looks empty and that's because more puffs were baking in the oven!
If you like to cook, then this is a great way to volunteer. It's not just for special occasions, you can do it for any day of the week. It may not be possible to cook everything for so many people (this shelter had 20-25 women). In such a case, stores like Costco help a lot. They've large sized everything and at very reasonable prices. You can always pick some additions from there. In fact we'd some dinner rolls leftover from previous night, we took those too and they got over in a jiffy!
Being a vegetarian we were always skeptical about whether our food even gets consumed at the shelters. So it was quite eye opening to see that a lot of the residents were vegetarians - they needed vegetarian options exclusively. Oh and so many of them were to excited to try out our Indian food! This was quite reassuring!
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