Val R. Christensen Service Center announces free weekly meal kits
The Val R. Christensen Service Center began a new series of cooking demonstrations, giving away free meal kits each week for the rest of the semester.
Beginning this new program the first week of February, the service center is putting together 15 meal kits each week students can pick up. Students are also sent a tutorial video demonstrating how to make the free meal.
Students can reserve a kit on Utah State’s new service database AggiePulse. Meal kits are distributed on a first-come, first-served basis, but students can be put on a waiting list after the first 15 meals are reserved.
Kara Bachman-Einfeldt, the Utah State University Student Association service vice president, is responsible for choosing each week’s free meal.
“I have tried to find meals that have new foods in them and also teach students a new technique,” Bachman-Einfeldt said.
The service center announces each week’s meal at the beginning of the month. Last week, students could pick up the ingredients for chocolate-dipped fruit for Valentine’s Day. In the coming weeks, students can look forward to mushroom rigatoni and salmon wraps.
The meals are mostly meat-free. Only two of the meals planned for the rest of the semester include meat.
“I don’t really like working with meat and with food safety and stuff. We just wanted to remove that factor,” Bachman-Einfeldt said. “And then a lot of people are vegetarian now, and so wanted to be inclusive with that.”
Usually, the tutorials for the meals come from YouTube, but for the free meal for the second week of March, Bachman-Einfeldt filmed a special three-course meal tutorial including black bean burgers, roasted carrots and applesauce cake.
“I should just suggest you should sign up for this because the bean burgers are so good, the roasted carrots are so good and the applesauce cake is so good,” Bachman-Einfeldt said. “The four guys that were filming me last week for this video, I think they were a little bit skeptical at first because I was mashing beans and cutting up, like, two pounds of carrots. But then they tasted it afterwards, and they’re like, ‘oh my goodness, it’s so good.’”
Though Bachman-Einfeldt is unsure if the weekly meals will continue after this semester, she’s hopeful due to the big interest students have shown in the meals so far.
Darcy Ritchie is a second-year journalism student at Utah State from Idaho Falls, Idaho. Outside of writing for the Statesman, she loves to DJ for Aggie Radio, eat french bread in the Walmart parking lot, and tweet.
—darcy.ritchie@usu.edu
@darcyrrose