Out of a tiny kitchen — hundreds of meals served with compassion

This story is a part of CBC Ottawa's Project Give, our annual holiday drive. The special day of programming runs Friday, Dec. 10, and we'll meet the people who are making the season kind by sharing food through Ottawa Food Bank, and showcasing acts of kindness through the community.

It's lunch time at Cornerstone Housing for Women and residents of the big brick building on Booth Street are lining up for a full buffet of nourishing dishes.

On today's menu there are two kinds soup, a choice of salads, a Thai-style stir-fry plus an assortment of freshly baked desserts. 

All this sustenance comes out of a tiny kitchen that serves the women who live there and hundreds of others in need across the city. 

The Booth Street residence provides a safe, stable home and two hot meals a day for women who once were forced to couch surf or live on the street.

"When I was living in other places, I'd get like macaroni and cheese or soup or like the cheap stuff, " said Sheena, who has lived at Cornerstone for a decade. 

"But here you get proteins. There's always a salad if you want a salad, it's really well balanced. They take everyone's needs into account."

Getting those meals to the table has been a challenge for the small cooking team at Cornerstone.

Before the pandemic they operated out of a full commercial kitchen located in Cornerstone's emergency shelter on O'Connor Street, but that changed as demand for emergency lodging doubled during the COVID-19 crisis and physical distancing became an issue. 

The City of Ottawa asked Cornerstone to find a new location while renovations were made. They moved in to a residence building at the University of Ottawa, but in less than six months they needed to move again to make way for returning students. 

Today the emergency shelter is in a temporary location on Heron Road, but the space doesn't have a kitchen.

That left food services manager Paul Skinner and his team of chefs the formidable task of pumping out daily hot meals from the small kitchen on Booth Street. 

"In essence we became a very, very large catering company," said Skinner. "Close to 2,500, 2,750 meals a week were produced in this kitchen, two thirds of those are packaged and delivered twice a day, seven days a week."

To keep up with the volume of demands, Skinner and his team converted a storage room into a freezer and a multipurpose room into a pantry and hired a delivery company to transport meals to the Heron Road shelter.

"Keeping on top of the logistics of it is the hardest part right now," said Skinner.

"We've had to increase the number of deliveries we get from our wholesalers because we don't have a lot of storage room. Some fresh produce is coming in and its used in a day, maybe two days, and then we have another order."

Donations from the Ottawa Food Bank also help supplement the grocery list.

Hot healthy meals served with compassion are appreciated by residents such as Brenda, who moved from an emergency shelter into Booth Street last year. 

"I have a family, I have a safe place, I got two meals a day I don't have to worry about it," said Brenda.