Sunday August 6th, (10AM until sell out) Inverness County Cares (ICC) will host their 4th annual pizza sale at 209, Main Street, Port Hood, in aid of the St Charles Lwanga Secondary School in Nairobi, Kenya. This event has proven to be a major fundraiser in the campaign to support the school. Preparation for this event begins about a month in advance. The process involves the recruiting of workers, calculating and ordering of ingredients, preparing schedules and reviewing notes and information on last year’s event. The crusts are prepared in advance, by a crew of a dozen workers. For the three previous years Hermina and Ted Van Zutphen’s kitchen was taken over by workers mixing, weighing, rolling, shaping and pre-cooking the crusts. This year the Clove Hitch Restaurant offered use of their kitchen, so from 5:30 AM to 11:30AM the restaurant kitchen was taken over by ICC workers. The two restaurant ovens and a great working space enabled ICC workers to produce 337 crusts. Taste tests were engaged in and the pizza made with Hermina’s crust recipe was declared delicious.
On Pizza day a multitude of volunteers descend on the spacious kitchen of Ted and Hermina Van Zutphen. Producing over 300 pizzas in a day takes many hands. Early morning the choppers and graters prepare the cheese and toppings. By 9:30 the large dining room table is transformed into a production line where prepared ingredients are applied to the crusts according to recipe. Central to all the activity is the large outdoor wood-fired brick pizza oven built by Alan MacIsaac. It can reach temperatures of 800C and quickly cooks our four varieties of pizza. Volunteers consist of ICC members but also include a large number of community supporters, including a sponsorship from Scotia Bank.
When the flour dust settles in the late evening of Pizza day, a very tired group of happy workers celebrate their relationship with this very basic school, while they think about three hundred hopeful children who are provided with an education, their only way to break the cycle of poverty. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
A sincere thank-you to our members, volunteers, supporters, The Clove Hitch and especially to Ted and Hermina Van Zutphen, who have covered the cost of all pizza ingredients for the last 4 years.
lwangachildren.com
invernesscountycares.com
