11.20.2014

BRIGHTER BITES – A DAY IN THE LIFE!

BRIGHTER BITES – A DAY IN THE LIFE! By Kristin Michalewicz and Jacqueline Noyola As Brighter Bites Coordinators (a North Texas Food Bank Partner Program) we are constantly on the go. Our jobs are rewarding and engaging, and can also be a bit hectic and sometimes force us to get our hands a little dirty! Last week, the Brighter Bites team met for a quick huddle to prepare for the week. We decided to make Crunchy Apple Crisps for families for the week’s healthy snack since it is prime apple season. After buying bags and bags of apples, we headed to NTFB’s amazing Community Kitchen to slice and bake the apples. (We couldn’t possibly give our precious kiddos the snack without a few taste tests ourselves to ensure deliciousness!) We packaged our Crunchy Apple Crisps and the recipe, along with the week’s supplies of nutrition education pieces for each of our nine schools. Then we hit the road. Kristin Michalewicz: I headed to a Brighter Bites elementary school in southwest Dallas. Because Brighter Bites is a collaborative, community based program, we work with each of our participating schools to recruit volunteers who help us bag the produce – the volunteers are mainly students’ family members, teachers, and occasionally older elementary students (9 and 10 year olds are crazy fast at bagging produce!). At noon I met Vaughan, the incredible NTFB distribution driver, at the school and he unloaded six pallets of fresh fruits and vegetables – a total of 5,100 pounds for 170 families at that school.

Alicia Farhat (left) Kristin Michalewicz (right) preparing food samples for Brighter Bites families!

As we were in an assembly line bagging the produce into two paper bags per family, I talked to one mom who used last week’s red and green peppers to make stuffed peppers with a delicious mix of ground beef, bread crumbs and seasoning. I was so excited to hear that her kids FIRST ate the green and red peppers, then the stuffing! Jacqueline Noyola: I went to a different elementary school in north east Dallas. While chatting with one volunteer mom, she told me that her elementary aged son has always been interested in food and cooking, and aspires to become a chef one day. Since participating in Brighter Bites this fall, her son has been able to experiment and explore using the fresh fruits and vegetables to create new recipes. He is using the produce as a tool to express his creativity in the kitchen. And hopefully he is charting the course to become a world famous chef! We love our jobs, and we love that we get to spend each day with sweet families who are dedicated to making their kids’ lives brighter by helping to nourish them with healthy, fresh food. At the end of each week we crash, exhausted from moving all that produce, but renewed and energized knowing that we provided brighter choices and brighter outlooks for our 1,800 Brighter Bites families!

Jacqueline Noyola ready to distribute delicious crunchy apple crisps!