This easy-to-use cookbook is Fresh Choice Kitchen’s essential guide to plenty of food with plenty of flavour. It’s a paperback chock full of good, healthy eating – more than 130 dishes in all. Because community kitchens (CKs) cook in quantity, each recipe has been “scaled” to fit the number of servings a group might desire. You like the sound of Mushroom-Stuffed Manicotti? The recipe in Many Hands tells you how much of each ingredient you will need in order to produce 10, 20, or 40 servings (of two flavor-packed tubes apiece). The math is already done.

 

The goal of Many Hands is to put mouthwatering-yet-sensible recipes into the hands of those who cook together. Along with the scaling of ingredients to yield a range of servings, you can glance at a recipe and get an idea of how easy it is by checking the hand logo on every one: one raised finger means it’s easy; two fingers mean it’s moderately simple; the three-finger sign takes you into more complex dishes.

 

Sharing is a big part what community kitchens do. As the subtitle of this book puts it well, this is where “Community kitchens share their best.” Many recipes came right from our own CK groups, and that reflects their success. Many Hands is now in its second edition and more than 2000 copies have been sold. (The price is only $14.95, order a copy!)

 

However good the ingredients, alone they’re not enough – you need someone with a keen eye who knows how to make the most of them. In the case of Many Hands, Fresh Choice Kitchens (formerly the Vancouver Community Kitchen Project) was fortunate to draw the interest of a keen leader-volunteer, Karen Barnaby, executive chef of the Fish House in Stanley Park. She’s a prominent (ever-smiling) face on the B.C. scene, one who has now written and/or edited 10 cookbooks. She was assisted by many other volunteers and contributors.

 

The book is peppered with small bites of kitchen wisdom – from chefs, from historic figures, and from community cooks here in B.C. In addition to those 130-plus recipes, there’s a chapter on how to start a CK, another on how to make sure you prepare food safely, and there’s also a guide to the basics of healthy nutrition. Take a look at the table of contents!  We highlighted two of the cookbook’s recipes in our first newsletter - try our Thai Red Cabbage Slaw and Beet & Carrot Cake.

 

Many Hands packs a lot between its bright, inviting covers. And when the dishes are done and the meals are divvied up, it makes sure there’s lots to share.