If interested in the series, please email aaliyah@tikkunfarm.com. The next series will start in late spring. 

Tikkun Farm began supporting neighborhood families by offering a four-week cooking class, “Cooking on a Budget.” This series teaches families to prepare meals using a crockpot and low cost, nutritionally dense ingredients. In every class, participants measure spices, chop vegetables, learn cooking techniques, and then take their ingredients home with them to cook in a crockpot. We provide crockpots to families who don’t have one. Participants who attend all four classes also take home cooking tools (cutting board, chef’s knife, vegetable peeler) and a gift card to Kroger.

In March of 2020 when local schools closed, suddenly children were home all day, and caregivers needed to feed children three meals a day instead of one. We realized with deepening concern how many families lived with food insecurity. Glenn, the chef who’d been leading our cooking classes, suggested Tikkun Farm begin to make dinners for our families.

I gulped. His suggestion was beautiful. And terrifying. I couldn’t imagine taking on a feeding program of that magnitude. That is the beautiful work La Soupe does in our city.  For a week I didn’t respond, thinking of all the reasons we couldn’t do this. Finally, I called, sharing my fears.

“We don’t have a commercial kitchen,” I said, “I can’t imagine how we could possibly cook that many meals.”

“We’ll just do what we were already doing,” he replied. “We will prep the ingredients, and families will cook it themselves, in their crockpots. Just like we do in the cooking classes. We can even use the same recipes.”

“Oh…,” I breathed. Yes, I could imagine this.

We had been offering this kind of food support to families for years thanks to La Soupe.  They  supported our first children’s summer camp, by sharing their “Cincinnati Gives a Crock”  program with us: donating food, allowing us to share recipe, and showing us how accessible this cooking model was for families in our community. Since then we’d offered crockpot cooking lessons to children and families in many variations. I knew we could change this up again to support our families during the pandemic.

“Ok,” I said, “let’s try it.”

The first week, we sent out 18 crockpot meal bags, and then 40, and 75 the third week. By the end the end of June we were sending out 300 meals a week, and still do. These meals support homeless families who’ve moved into hotels during COVID, elderly neighbors concerned about leaving their homes, single parents suddenly feeding children who usually receive two meals at school, disabled veterans, and more.

If your family faces financial and food insecurity and you live in the Mt. Healthy area, please submit a request to receive a monthly family meal by filling out this form.

Thanks to La Soupe and their Cincinnati Gives a Crock program for inspiring our program.

Our Crockpot Meal program began with donated food from one local food bank. When we received more food than we could use in our crockpot dinner bags, we offered the surplus to our neighbors needing food support. Miraculously, as the number of families coming for food increased, so did the donations. Nine months later, we had more than twenty partners sharing food with us. Currently we support 300 families a week and distribute about 30,000 pounds of food a month.

By the end of the summer, we knew Tikkun’s Free Food Market needed a permanent home where guests could shop year-round. In January of 2021, the Well House opened its doors and guests began shopping indoors for the first time.