Volunteers Make “Pies For People”

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(Host) For the second year, a group of Northeast Kingdom volunteers made sure that Thanksgiving dinners for dozens of people ended with a helping of pie.

They were baked in the kitchen of Sterling College in Craftsbury Common.

Student and faculty volunteers baked dozens squash pies for the Hardwick Food bank and various suppers around town, and this year they added squash soup to the menu.

The project, called Pies for the People, originated with a surplus of squash grown for High Mowing Seeds at Foote Brooke farm in Johnson.

Sterling College student Schirin Oeding picks up the story from last year’s inaugural event.

(Oeding) We are baking pies, for the people, 60 of them. And they will be going to lots of different places in the community and all the ingredients are locally sourced, which is amazing. So it was a real, sort of, community effort to get everything together to go into these pies. And we’re, I guess the second last link. The last one will be the eating of the pies.

(Shipley) UVM students harvested butternut squash at Foote Brook Farm, in Johnson. The squash were transported to Pete’s Greens where they were, where the squash pulp was cooked down in a kettle and put into five gallon buckets marked, I think tractor parts or something like that, and frozen. They were fetched out of Pete’s freezer and brought up to our freezer while we collected other ingredients.

The milk comes from North Hardwick Dairy. The eggs came from Applecheek Farm in Morrisville, and then we had to dash out and get some more eggs. Lily Gate Farm eggs – so that we could say they were local eggs. The maple sugar comes from Butternut Mountain Farm. The spices come from Hardwick Coop.

Charlie Emers, of Patchwork Farm Bread, made the pie dough out of donated Cabot butter and Butterworks flour. He spent his whole day Saturday making them and I picked them up on Sunday night. Everything came together in this kitchen and is being baked right now.

They’re going to come out in an hour and cool and tomorrow morning, before the kitchen needs to be used for breakfast, I’ll load them into the school van and take them down to the//Hardwick food pantry. Some of them are going to be further dropped off at The Center for an Agricultural Economy and they’re going to be used in the Hardwick Community Supper, at lunchtime on Thursday. More pies are going to be distributed to the Greensboro Nursing Home and the Greensboro Early Learning Center. And that is the long journey of a squash to the mouth of a person, but it’s so much less of a journey than if we were to have gone to the supermarket where the food comes from California, and it comes from Wisconsin, and it comes from Maryland, and it comes from everywhere else. So this is a, it’s a local pie!

(Host) We also heard from Sterling College faculty member Julia Shipley. VPR’s Amy Noyes produced our audio postcard.

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