Gourmet Cooking, How It Can Be Done For Free

Preparing tonight’s dinner was a bit of a challange, I might admit. Aside from my usually standard fare of salad and veggies with everything, I had an overage problem. I overdove. Kosher or not, my fridge is full with high quality food that I dove for free. The reason is, that my last dive provided me with a massive stockpile of gourmet ice cream. 84 containers of it to be exact. T Joe’s had a massisive ice cream binge, and I took it all home. Chocolate, Strawberry sorbet, vanilla, and hershey mudpie have been a few of my favorites so far. And the fact of the matter is, everyone likes ice cream and it was going to melt anyway.

As I looked over the massive array of ingredites at my disposal, I drafted a menu of lemon salmon cakes, apple salad, and toast with Gorgonzola cheese. These ingredents were the closest items at hand, and went quite well together to say the least. The savory blend of lemon and fish, combined with the crisp taste of a granny smith apple salad, paried with a fine blend of imported cheese was enough to satisfy my palet, at least for tonight.

Bon Appetit

Where is Theresienhöhe 3 Munich, Bavaria, Deutschland? And Are Electric Outlets Extinct ?

Word of advice, plan for the worst thing possible. Which in this case would be to bring a tent and sleeping bag everywhere. Our day of travel included riding trains for 9 hours. Which would be exhausting in most cases, but being adventurous travelers, we had decided on the couchsurfing option of travel. All my couchsurfing memories have been great fun and now I have foreign friends in many different countries. However, maybe I am limited to hosting as our first German couchsurfing experience turned out to be a disaster.

We arrived with all electronic devices dead. This included my iphone, a computer, a regular phone, and all other options of communication dead. So therefore, in cases like this, you search for the nearest coffee shop and plug up. And use the public bathroom like most normal people. However, Germany does not believe in bathrooms, nor outlets. I sneaked my way into one, (cause you have to pay a euro to pee) while Eric tried to revive all sources of power. So we then went by sheer intuition of the train system to a place where we thought it would be. However Munich is a large city and randomly finding streets by chance is about the probability of me popping out a child.

Since we are traveling on the cheap, we decided spending money was unnecessary and useless. So Eric left me at a bus stop while he frolicked around looking for some plugs. After no such luck we decided that staying with the luggage at McDonalds was probably the best option since I packed some bricks that resembled clothing. 2 hours later I had decided that going home with the 40ish graying manager would probably be the only option of a warm bed. No matter what the cost. Also, since my options of staying with random cute little German boys was tainted by the fact that I don’t speak any language except English. So I decided to learn the Mcdonalds vocabulary. kann ich dass mit Pommes frites was not going to help me in this situation, but it was the best I could do if worse came to worst. Eric finally came back, had ran all over the city and now felt sick what the thought of if his sister went missing. Luggage in tow, we finally went to a random university and plugged up.

That situation taken care of, we now went in search of our nice couchsurfing host who said that he still wanted us to come with him. So off we went. Our host ended up living a couple blocks from the Octoberfest grounds, however those things are huge and pushing our luggage around through a field of gravel broke our main suitcase. And Eric had a fever. So we wondered around in the middle of the grounds, lost, cold, and bed-less. And then we arrived, but there was no 3, anywhere. So as we tried to figure out what to do, I witnessed a fight, a random chase around a bar by several employees. So what does one in this situation, reboot. So we took a cab to the station and walked a good 30 min with our broken luggage to the 2nd closest hostel.

I woke up to a snuggle sandwich below me, who sleeps with people in a hostel?

Only in Munich, Kaitlyn

Sitting In a German McDonald’s

I’m sitting in a German McDonald’s writing on an iPhone while two 4 year olds run around talking in German and crawling under tables while I look after our luggage. The title of this trip is called Germany on the cheap because traveling is quite the contrary to many people’s thoughts, quite cheap. We stayed the first three nights with our wonderful host family the Thielman’s. They are currently stationed in Frankfort , working for the state dept. Our first couple days have been a lot of train riding and navigating the system. We toured some old church grounds and looked at some of the ancient roman ruins that were bombed during WWII. We also walked around a lot of the historic district and went walking on the banks of the rhine.
Maps are truly amazing. Armed with current technology only, we would have gotten extremely lost. Eric is a great map reader and now is a pro at navigating Frankfurt as well as most large cities. Our hostel is currently located in the red light district of Frankfurt as there are several brothels nearby. Hello Europe.

When It’s too cold to feel your toes

Maybe I’m A wimp or maybe I’m just really from the south but I dislike cold weather. But only a certain kind of cold weather, the snowless kind. The kind where you can’t feel your toes but there is no snow on the ground. Welcome to North Carolina where the weather changes every day from sky high heat to blustery cold overnight.

Tip one of dumpster diving, make sure you are comfortable. If your legs are numb from cold you might never get out of a dumpster and eventually freeze to death.

Tip two, always being a buddy
God said two are always better than one and he is always right. Passing off food to each other and having a buddy system is the most important rule.

Tip three: share
I have this now amazing community that loves dumpster diving and likes to come over for dinner. There is no uninvited guest

Spilage,Spoilage and Signage

There was a lot of meat. In fact, several boxes .What to do with all this meat was the question. My dumpster diving partner looked at me with a puzzled face as she asked me how to determine bad meat. The thing was I wan’t sure. After using ehow to see what is exactly a harmful look for meat, we determined that all the products with less than an appetizing look would be appropriate to keep.

Little House On The Prairie (Urban style)

So I had a problem, a big one. We had way more apples than I personally could eat. In fact, more than anyone could eat. And these apples had seen better days. Not only were they dumpster salvaged; they had sat in the kitchen for several days while my life fell apart during finals.
What to do with a bushel of half mushy apples was one of the options that I considered, but that process is a ton of work, not to mention a huge mess. So desperate situations call for desperate times, it was time for some massive dehydration of our fruit hoarding.

Not to mention that we could now gift our product. Apple chips for finals, what could be better? In fact, maybe we could capitalize on this idea and sell them on our neighborhood street corner . What could be better than 100% profit? Drying food had been a method of preservation since the ancient times.
Urban Indians ? I think yes. Peace.Love. Jesus

Dumpster Fresh

Dumpster Fresh. The overwhelming smell of dumpster overpowers my car as I drive home from uncc to my Noda bungalow (what kevin calls my house) Never have I been so happy in my life. Our house just calculated our bills for the first of the month and we spend more than 1000 dollars on just our house. I’ve been living off of canned pasta, old dumpster food, and the charity of other people for days it’s seemed like and oh how my body has suffered. I’ve come to understand in the more recent days on how people suffer in many ways. I’m so blessed with food, an education, and people that love me every day.

The weather has turned cold, and as I pass the tents on n tryon, I praise God that I have a home. Half the world doesn’t have enough to eat, meanwhile we throw away so much. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I ate three thanksgiving dinners. Thanksgiving dinner at the y, the next day, thanksgiving dinner at the county service center. Both were memorable, both were good, however you never know when you are entertaining angles.

A Speak Up vendor came from the men’s shelter to the y and on the way out the door expressed to me how greatful he was for a little income and food and shelter. Praise be to God.

Summer Sweat; Dining in the Heat

Meat: how do you determine what is good and what is bad? Produce: if it is soft and mushy, is it salvageable? Eggs: do you know how the float test works? I recently had some friends go diving for the first time and they bombarded me with a list of questions that should be in a guide for newbies to dumpster diving.

First, anything that looks questionable should be tossed. Actually composted. Who doesn’t want free garden compost? Second, anything sealed is probably good. Dairy included. I have this thesis that yogurt never actually goes bad. We have a yogurt drawer at our house and we found yogurt we don’t remember diving.

Lastly, remember hand sanitizer. Driving with dumpster juice on you is never a good thing. God is Good 7/26/11

A Surfer, a Diver, and Piña Colada

Adventure is in the middle of Kaitlyn and Tokay when it comes to the name my family blessed me with. Planning for adventure is too time consuming so I just let the life cherries fall where they may. Couch surfing is one of the up and coming things to hit America. Only a small population of the American population are couch surfers or actually let strangers eat their food, sleep on their furniture or use their shower.

Yesterday I had the honor and pleasure to let Alana sleep on my couch. She and I had no previous couch experience, nor had she messaged me about sharing. She randomly found a fellow couch surfer and then it fell through so she went a-couching. After informing my roommate about this I proceeded to rapidly clean my house and prepare for cultural adventure.

Diving was a must. I tell half the population of Charlotte about them and encourage everyone to try it out. After several past attempts at dumpster fails, we felt like tonight was a good night to explore. After loading more people on board we went to our first store and hit the cheese jackpot. Our two virgin divers quickly fell in love with the whole process and we quickly filled up car with food.

A grocery store with an animal name was stop number two, and the dumpster was filled to overflowing with footage from a variety of categories. Tonic water and club soda was a new dived product and we quickly realized that we could not take as much of this glorious find as we wished. Although the food was good, the dumpster was oozing yogurt like none other and every food find was doused in a good dose of Dannon.

Splitting our goods, we headed out for the night fully satisfied with our beautiful find. Peace out Charlotte.
Good food. Good friends. Good life.

Room At The Inn

This week I have had Jesus rock my world in so many ways. Not only do I not have control of anything at all, but I am reminded every day about how I am such in need of Grace. However this week I’ve learned more about Charlotte street living then any other subject in school.

Room at the Inn is one of the best programs to conquer the problems of sleeping on the street that I have ever seen. Located at Urban Ministries this program has an intake process that involves some basic screening before being bussed off to local churches. Beth Hardin, a vice chancellor at UNCC invited me to come to the intake process a month or so ago, and I learned all about the process of being brought into RATI(Room at the Inn).

Last Thursday I went urban camping at Hickory Grove Presbyterian Church. Straight after work, I went and spent the night at the church with 13 other homeless men and women. Since walking on the streets is much more tiring then running around school all day, they go to bed around 9 or 10. After chilling with Jake and Steph for a while, I fell asleep exhausted on a loveseat while our neighbors slept in the room next door.

The alarms started going off at 4:30 am when breakfast was supposed to be cooked up and served. Stumbling sleepily to the kitchen I was greeted by cheerful Hickory Grove church members who were baking up biscuits and dishing out grits. Around 5 am the small crowd lined up for the stick-to-your-ribs breakfast. Sitting at the table I got to hear several people’s stories of how they got to this place. Resident A was told by a judge he could have no contact with his girl friend who is currently living at his house, and resident B who was laid off and is collecting unemployment while he gets back on his feet from his disability.

I have this fascination with learning people’s stories. I think one of the best gift in life is sharing your heart and learning how to let people love you and how to love people. I visited Room at the Inn again today. I forgot that SIFE was visiting a church to help the neighbors, and quickly decided that my basketball game was not important as talking to David, who was at Hickory Grove 3 days before. David had recognized me from the previous church and we begin to strike up our conversation. I learned about his life, stuff he had done in his past, why he was in the situation that he was in, and what is going to happen after his court date.

I met the exception tonight. Someone who was not supposed to be there and it rocked my world. It could happen to anyone. One little slip and you could have a jail record and find yourself eating out of soup kitchens instead of your house. Over our multiple checkers games I found out that I know nothing about life, and I’m totally in love with Jesus and how he can turn someone from cold to a burning fire for Him. Praise be to Jesus.

http://www.urbanministrycenter.org/