In Honor of My Mom

In honor of my mom - My mother passed away this morning.  I luckily had a chance to talk to her on the phone last week before she went in for a procedure that was expected to be just a simple one. I happened to call home and my Dad gave me the number in her hospital room.  I take great comfort in that conversation.   Over the last five years this blog was a gift - it gave us fun things to talk about and she enjoyed the pictures, especially from my projects around the house and business trips and travel.  She had just seen the post on the trip to Scotland and I'm so glad I included the one of Julia jumping for joy on Arthur's Seat, with snowflakes all around. 

I am re-running the post I did back in April 2009 for April Food Day: Bloggers Fighting Hunger.  In this post I featured her work in the soup kitchen in Auburn, NY.

"What's the picture of? That's my mom, Mary Ann Duffy Ginnerty, in my hometown's soup kitchen at the Episcopal Church at SS. Peter and John, which she ran as a volunteer for four years before moving to the Cape. The local food bank was very important to their efforts. Here's an excerpt from an acticle about the soup kitchen by Christopher Caskey of The Citizen.
(photo by Chet Susslin)

"On Mondays, she calls food banks to see what is available and form a menu. Tuesdays are for defrosting. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, she hits the sales for cheap food, and on Friday she makes last-minute changes to the menu...Each meal has to be balanced, she said. Every person is served soup, a main course, some kind of fruit, a vegetable and juice. However, that doesn't mean there is no variety.Homemade Reuben sandwiches were a recent hit. And people always gobble up a recipe she once found for spaghetti pie, Ginnerty said.“I wouldn't offer anything to my guests that I wouldn't offer to my family,” she added

Back in 2006 they served 6,500 - 7,000 meals a year.