Instead of Chili’s

"As a child my family's menu consisted of two choices: take it or leave it." Buddy Hackett

Have you seen the commercial where some friends are in a car and trying to decide what they should do? They are looking for something that would be different and they final decide that in order to do something different they should go out to dinner at Chili’s. But is that really something different? You want to try something different, here is a suggestion.

When you and your friends get together and are looking for something different why not cook or prepare a meal(s) for someone else. Find a shelter that hand out prepared meals. Where I live there are plenty of these organizations, one handing out up to 10,000 sandwiches a month and the homeless shelter we help serves about 50 homeless men a night and that is on a slow night.

“When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist.” Dom Helder Camara

When we bring sandwiches to the shelter we simply drop them off, but when we bring a hot meal we stay. Usually the meals are simple, ziti, chili, etc. along with a bread or muffin and some fruit. All of this food cost me less than a dollar a person. You want to see a group of happy people bring them a hot meal, when they are used simply to sandwiches, on a cold Syracuse night.

"If we can conquer space, we can conquer childhood hunger" Buzz Aldrin

How did we do that? Use the Buy One Give One idea of which I wrote of earlier. Since we knew we were going to provide a meal to those in need we would buy items along the way and designate them to that purpose. We also let friends of ours know in advance that we were going to make a meal and they make the bread or muffins. Sometimes we get together to make the meals and other times we meet and combine the meal into bags to make it easier to hand out.
How many meals could you make for the same cost as what you would spend for a night out?