Angel Food Ministries

I briefly mentioned Angel Food Ministries in my last post and thought I'd give a little more detail.

Angel Food Ministries is a non-denominational organization started about 15 years ago in Georgia. It is supposed to be non-profit, but if I remember, there were some funky issues with nepotism and crazy high salaries for organization leaders.

However, if you are looking for a relatively budget-friendly grocery option, Angel Food may be something you want to look into. I'll be honest, I don't like a lot of their food and quit using it some years ago when I realized I don't know why in the hell I would eat breaded chicken and steak except for the fact that I was extremely broke and looking for some way to feed my family.

I wasn't even quite sure what I was supposed to do with breaded meat. Bake it? Fry it? Grill it? I think the correct answer is supposed to be "fry it" but I do not fry due to personal safety reasons. I try to get all snippety with people in real life and tell them I don't fry because it isn't healthy. That is a good point, but the truth is frying is a damned dangerous sport. I don't like to participate.

I think their menus have improved a little and they do have things in their "options" boxes that I want. Since my mother has kept my children so much for me this fall so I could go to work and volunteer with Tuba Girl's band stuff, my children have eaten more than a few dinners at Chez de Granny. To compensate for what she spends on their meals, I have started buying an Angel Food box for them each month. It costs $30 and is supposed to feed a family of four for a week.

Though it seems they aren't jamming lots of breaded meat into the box, it's still pretty heavy on the meat side. This month's $30 box included chicken tenders, fish sticks, a center cut of ham, a pound of groud beef, steak stir fry strips, and 1.5 pounds of New York strip steaks.

I'll be honest. Outside of hamburger, salmon, ground venison and chicken, I don't really know what in the hell to do with meat. Pork chops, roast beef, tongue, brisket, lamb, duck, turkey - these are things that confuse me. I can cook a roast beef, but everytime I buy one I end up staring at it wondering where on the cow's ass it used to be located. The rest of it is just a mystery.

I like meat, but I don't like large lumps of it. I prefer it not even resemble the animal it used to be affixed to. That's why I always buy boneless or ground. So the Angel Food box with it's boney hams and steaks is just out of my scope of edible right now. If I really had to pinch a food budget out somewhere, I'd probably utilize it more and get over my boned and/or breaded meat issue. Well, actually, I have gone throught that phase and I'd rather not run back through it any time soon.

So while the Angel Food box doesn't really work for me at home, my mom usually knows what to do with it so the kids get something to eat and I don't bust her grocery budget.

On the other hand, I calculated the cost of the fruit offered in October's Special #4 and considered it an excellent deal for my house. I figure I probably got about $30 worth of fruit and vegetables for $22. That's a savings of $8 for shit we're actually going to eat.

Anyone can utilize Angel Food. In fact, most volunteers I've met really want everyone to use it because the greater their numbers, the greater their buying power. So I really do encourage everyone to give it a look over every once in a while to see if they're interested in any of the specials.

I did not use Angel Food for a long time because in order to buy the "specials," each buyer was required to buy the "Signature box" (see the breaded meat issue earlier in this blog). However, it has recently come to my attention that one is no longer required to buy the Signature box so I can actually just buy all the fruit my fridge will hold and never have to really consider the meat issue.

I find the fruit to be comparable to grocery store fruit. The fruit isn't abused, mishandled, bruised or mushy. It's no honey crisp apples, but so few things are in this world.

Since this is a Christian charitable organization, a buyer does most usually go to a local church to purchase the food by a certain deadline. (Somewhere early in the second week of each month, if I remember correctly.) The food is then shipped to the churches and the buyer arrives early the following Saturday with her own box or bags to recieve the items. In the past, it used to take two weeks for the food to return instead of six days and this was something else that turned a lot of would-be buyers off as two weeks is a long time to wait for food when you're on a tight budget.

Some people don't want to go because they don't want to deal with churches. Others don't want to go because they don't like the host church. The first host church here was actually full of batshit crazy fundies and I wasn't too big on picking up my food from there because, well, they were batshit crazy.

I don't care if that first one was giving away free expired bread from Kroger, there are just certain levels of batshit I'm willing to deal with and they were just off somewhere enough for me to give it up. I don't remember what they did, but it was enough to turn me away from free coffee cake.

But every church is a different experience and I've rather liked the last two host sites I've utilized over the years. Other than the experience with my first host site, most volunteers are pretty friendly, outgoing people. They usually tuck in a little recipe planner and Angel Food Ministry booklet into my box. Sometimes I may get a little extra Jesus literature, but no one, so far, has tried to lay hands on me and suck out the demons.

In the end I'm relatively cool with Jesus literature. They're doing their thing and I'm doing mine. I figure if I invite myself to utilizing their charitable organization, I'm sure not going to bitch about a little passive soul saving technique.

So there is my review on Angel Food Ministries. There's damn good deals to be found in these times of woe and want.

Come back tomorrow when I go over my grocery list in painful detail!