MSAA and Net Impact: Chinese Cuisine served at Lincoln Park Community Shelter
MSAA and Net Impact: Chinese Cuisine served at Lincoln Park Community Shelter Heading link
Thank you to MSAA Treasurer & Net Impact Co-Treasurer, Danni Zheng, for contributing this post.
Over St. Patrick’s Day weekend, a volunteer group consisting of UIC Liautaud students from MSAA & Net Impact organizations, shared their goodwill with the residents of the Lincoln Park Community Shelter (LPCS) by cooking and serving a wonderful hot lunch for the residents.
Everyone arrived at the site on time and started to help out as soon as the groceries arrived. This time we tried Chinese cuisine, with Chicken Lo Mein as our main dish – a simple yet delicious recipe.
The whole kitchen was filled with sizzling sounds and fragrance of the food, as well as the conversations and laughter of our volunteers: Soonoh and Dandan cooked the noodles and baked the appetizers (pizza rolls); Josh and Joanna marinated the chicken and stir-fried all the ingredients; Layla, Flor, Andrew, Vance and Danni took care of chopping all the vegetables and chicken.
After ninety minutes of chopping and cooking, our hot lunch was ready to be served with fruit, lemonade and orange juice that we prepared as well. Luckily we cooked generous portions, as almost everyone asked for a second round of our Chicken Lo Mein! The residents loved the oriental flavor we presented and even asked about our recipe and ingredients.
This joint-event was a great success: we recruited enough volunteers within a single day; we enjoyed the time together cooking and the food was highly appreciated. We were delighted to see that fellow students from both student organizations had great fun mingling with each other.
Sincere thanks to our wonderful MSAA & Net Impact volunteers: Vance Chen, Dandan Wang, Layla Yuan Tian, Soonoh Kwon, Joanna Wan Zhu, Flor Fernandez, Josh Xinyuan Zhao, Andrew Hastie & Danni Zheng. Big thanks also to all who showed interest but could not participate because of space limitations.
Special thanks to our photographer Vance Chen and our external grocery helper Aidan Wu.