Wehrli adds green beans to the mix of pork, green pepper, onion and carrots.An abundance of the long, green vegetables has prompted the Linn Benton Food Share to compile volunteers’ favorite recipes.
The Linn Benton Food Share knows vegetables, but right now they know green beans especially well. The food share gets tons of frozen vegetables from Norpac, a packing facility in Salem. Lately, it has been receiving a lot of green beans.
The frozen beans come in boxes of about 1,000 pounds. Then volunteers repackage them into bags that are family size.
“We have no choice over what gets donated,” said Mike Gibson, director of Linn Benton Food Share. “Often we got a lot of green beans.”
According to Gibson, the food share gave out 42,188 boxes of food to roughly 50,000 people last year. That is not including the homeless shelters and soup kitchens at which they provided 261,847 meals. All together, the food share gave out roughly 5 million pounds of food.
“Our numbers are at record highs,” Gibson said. “It has been a tough couple of years.”
Currently, the food share has 4,800 volunteers that are members of 14 gleaning groups. It also has five full-time employees and three part-time employees.
Because of the high numbers of green beans, Susan James, the gleaning and volunteer program coordinator, thought it would be a good idea to put together a pamphlet of recipes from the volunteers at the Linn Benton Food Share.
Two of those volunteers are Jeff Wehrli and Carol Cannell.
Wehrli is at the food share almost every Tuesday and every other Wednesday. Along with helping package what comes in, he helps direct parking.
He said that he and his wife, Lisa, have to cook around their 16-year-old daughter Kayla’s tastes.
“She is kind of a picky eater,” Wehrli said. “But she loves green beans.”
He makes a sweet and sour dish, and “I just add in what I have,” he said.
In the recipe he shared for sweet and sour pork, he cooked the pork in chicken broth and then added green bell peppers, carrots, onions and green beans.
“The kid doesn’t like pineapple,” he said. “So we add green beans.”
Cannell has been volunteering at the food share for two months. During the summer she also gleans in the fields.
For her, green beans were something she always had in the house.
“I used to grind up green beans in a food processor and add them to meat,” she said. She would then make hamburgers out of the mixture so her children and grandchildren would eat vegetables.
“It was sneaky, but they got the nutrition they needed,” she said.
Now she gets most of her green bean recipe ideas from vegetarian cookbooks.
“I probably eat green beans four or five times a week,” she said.
Sweet and Sour Pork
Ingredients:
3/4 cup chicken broth
1 pound pork, cut into 1-inch cubes
1 red or green bell pepper, diced
1 medium onion, cut in half lengthwise and sliced into thin wedges
2 or 3 carrots, sliced on the diagonal into 1/4-inch slices
A handful of frozen green beans
Sweet and sour sauce, add to taste
Directions:
Heat the chicken broth over medium-high heat. Add the pork and cook thoroughly.
Drop in chopped bell pepper, onion and carrots. Cook until vegetables start to soften.
Add in frozen green beans and cook until green beans are warm all the way through.
Add sweet and sour sauce (Wehrli suggests that if you don’t have any sweet and sour sauce, you can use soy sauce).
Place over rice, noodles or rice noodles.
Recipe by Jeff Werli
Recipe pamphlet
To get a copy of “Green Bean Recipes” by the Linn Benton Food Share gleaning program, go to www.communityservices.us/foodshare.htm
