Dear Feastlings,
Before anything, let’s all send our collective good wishes to those who are being evacuated from their homes, as well as those who are being told to ready themselves to do so. As if it weren’t scary enough to have COVID numbers jumping and social unrest and vitriol at every turn, and huge numbers of us suddenly on very shaky financial ground, now there are whole swaths of town wondering whether their homes will be okay. We will, of course, be adding firefighters to our list of meal donation recipients, but the sheer volume of people fighting the Bighorn Fire coupled with the terrain leaves them for now better fed by the systems they have in place. That said, everyone likes to feel appreciated even after the fact, or while they’re taking a break someplace away form whichever disaster they’re dealing with- I got a very sweet note from a nurse who was thrilled to get home after a scary, stressful and depressing twelve-hour shift and drop a bag of crawfish etouffee into simmering water for a few minutes and put her feet up for a bit.
Because the arrangements all take quite a bit of back and forth between various people, we generally have to work a couple of weeks ahead of ourselves, and while we’ll continue to bring meals to our hospital workers, who are already feeling it ramping up again, a couple of weeks ago, we felt it would be a good idea to help out those who are helping our animal population in Tucson. So our next donation run will be going to the people at several of the animal shelters in Tucson, helping to take care of the animals whose humans have suddenly found themselves without the means to care for them. More on that as I get it squared away, and we’re closing in on an event with the Primavera Foundation in early July, so there’ll be more on that as well.
In the meanwhile, we’re also trying to keep ourselves occupied by making the dishes you’ve asked for, so the staff is busily and dutifully making duck tamales and red gazpacho (which, like the white gazpacho, has no race-related agenda attached to it) for the weekend, but before you call and try to order either one, this email is merely an enticement, and neither one is ready for service this evening. What we DO have is gnocchi and sausage, with fennel, spinach and Parmesan cream, and a bunch of other stuff you can find here.
We also have menus up for Father’s Day, and the Bonfires of San Juan, our Spanish-themed celebration of the Summer Solstice, and information about tomorrow’s wine tasting as well as another one of our delivery runs to far-flung parts of Tucson, this one to the northeast but also the west side.
And that, my friends, is that, for today. Stay safe and well.
Your friend,
Doug