This past school year, the Dallas team served families at 20 programming sites. Learn all about the program and meet the folks who make it possible!
An Inside Look at Brighter Bites in Dallas, Texas
Keyword/Tag: North Texas Food Bank
Lettuce Celebrate our Dallas Volunteers!
Come On, Join the Party!
This spring, our teams had the opportunity to celebrate the hard work and heavy lifting of their volunteers. On May 25 the North Texas Food Bank served as party headquarters for Brighter Bites volunteers in Dallas. The celebration honored the amazing group of community members who contributed a total of 7,088 hours towards the bagging and distribution of more than 1.4 million pounds of produce over the academic year! That’s definitely something worth celebrating!
Volunteers were treated to a healthy breakfast buffet featuring egg frittatas and our very own Brighter Bites Apple Cake.
Representatives from each school show off their fruit and vegetable awards, which celebrate each unique team of volunteers.
Volunteers and staff alike couldn’t get enough of the dress up options at the photo booth.
A Taste of Brighter Bites
What does a Brighter Bites celebratory breakfast taste like?
Try our Apple Cake for yourself!
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INGREDIENTS 1½ large red apples, thinly sliced
1 tsp + 1 tsp cinnamon 1 cup + 1 cup unsweetened applesauce 1½ cups whole wheat flour 1½ tsp baking powder ½ tsp baking soda ½ tsp salt ¼ tsp ground ginger ¼ tsp ground nutmeg ¼ tsp ground cloves 1 very ripe banana, mashed 1 egg ½ cup sugar 1 tsp vanilla extractDIRECTIONSPreheat oven to 350°F and spray a 9×13 baking pan with cooking spray. In a large mixing bowl, combine the sliced apples, cinnamon, and 1 cup of applesauce until the apple slices are evenly coated. Then, layer the apple slices on the bottom of the pan.Next, in a mixing bowl combine the dry ingredients: flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and spices. In a separate bowl, combine the wet ingredients (egg, banana, sugar, vanilla, and the remaining cup of applesauce) and mix with a spoon or an electric mixer until well incorporated. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix until everything is well incorporated.Pour the cake batter over the sliced apples and spread evenly. Bake in the oven for 35 minutes and remove when done. Allow the cake to cool, then flip over onto a large platter. Slice into 24 pieces and enjoy! |
Summer Programs Kick Off in Dallas at 15 Sites!
This summer our Dallas team will be working at 15 different camps! Nearly 2000 families will receive nutrition education and 30-35 pounds of produce each week camp is in session. Thanks to North Texas Food Bank, YMCA of Metropolitan Dallas, Boys and Girls Clubs of Dallas, Girls Inc. of Metropolitan Dallas, and others, for getting this summer season off to a great start for the children who attend these camps!
Dallas is Done!
Wow! The semester flies by when you’re working with wonderful schools, families, and fresh produce! During the eight weeks, we brought healthier choices and fun food experiences to our families. One mother of three and a weekly volunteer at John Q. Adams Elementary, Elizabeth Salazar, absolutely loved Brighter Bites and the positive influence it had on her family! 
Elizabeth and her family Our mission is to feed with impact by providing access to fresh produce and increasing food literacy with fun and informative nutrition education materials. Elizabeth used the 30 pounds of produce, donated by the North Texas Food Bank, to make delicious and healthful meals for her family. She said “with the fresh produce I receive, I can cook for my whole family and everybody is happy!” Elizabeth was able to stretch her weekly grocery budget to ensure her three growing youngters have healthy meals and full bellies. 
Cheese Stuffed Zucchini that Elizabeth made NTFB and Brighter Bites impacted 1800 families this semester in nine Dallas schools! Each week we distributed 54,000 pounds of fresh produce; that’s a total of 432,000 pounds of freshness, crispiness, crunchiness, and unfiddled around with goodness over the course of the semester! Our amazing mom and volunteer, Elizabeth, said “the program is awesome because it’s nice to help and be helped at the same time!” We can’t wait to get back in the swing of things and bring more color and crunch to our families in the spring of 2015!
It’s a Wrap in Houston
It’s been a whirlwind! The Houston operation doubled in size! We took on more schools than we’ve ever done and served more families than we ever have. We were able to give them even more variety with new items such as persimmons, rutabaga, and kabocha squash. We’ve experimented with new recipes and snacks. And we overhauled our education materials to include more of what you asked for! More recipes, more cooking skills, and more information about keeping your family healthy. 2014 has been a tremendous year of growth for Brighter Bites. None of which would be possible without the wonderful staff of the Houston Food Bank and North Texas Food Bank who made it their mission to get us more produce. We love our warehouse staff who took care to build our pallets and our fun-loving drivers who made sure it was delivered. And we can’t forget about our dedicated volunteers who participated every week at each site. It’s hard work and nobody knows it better than them. Brighter Bites is really a team effort and we’re thankful to have so much support! Thank you all for another great semester! 
Brighter Bites – A Day in the Life!
BRIGHTER BITES – A DAY IN THE LIFE! By Kristin Michalewicz and Jacqueline Noyola As Brighter Bites Coordinators (a North Texas Food Bank Partner Program) we are constantly on the go. Our jobs are rewarding and engaging, and can also be a bit hectic and sometimes force us to get our hands a little dirty! Last week, the Brighter Bites team met for a quick huddle to prepare for the week. We decided to make Crunchy Apple Crisps for families for the week’s healthy snack since it is prime apple season. After buying bags and bags of apples, we headed to NTFB’s amazing Community Kitchen to slice and bake the apples. (We couldn’t possibly give our precious kiddos the snack without a few taste tests ourselves to ensure deliciousness!) We packaged our Crunchy Apple Crisps and the recipe, along with the week’s supplies of nutrition education pieces for each of our nine schools. Then we hit the road. 
Kristin Michalewicz: I headed to a Brighter Bites elementary school in southwest Dallas. Because Brighter Bites is a collaborative, community based program, we work with each of our participating schools to recruit volunteers who help us bag the produce – the volunteers are mainly students’ family members, teachers, and occasionally older elementary students (9 and 10 year olds are crazy fast at bagging produce!). At noon I met Vaughan, the incredible NTFB distribution driver, at the school and he unloaded six pallets of fresh fruits and vegetables – a total of 5,100 pounds for 170 families at that school.
Alicia Farhat (left) Kristin Michalewicz (right) preparing food samples for Brighter Bites families!
As we were in an assembly line bagging the produce into two paper bags per family, I talked to one mom who used last week’s red and green peppers to make stuffed peppers with a delicious mix of ground beef, bread crumbs and seasoning. I was so excited to hear that her kids FIRST ate the green and red peppers, then the stuffing! Jacqueline Noyola: I went to a different elementary school in north east Dallas. While chatting with one volunteer mom, she told me that her elementary aged son has always been interested in food and cooking, and aspires to become a chef one day. Since participating in Brighter Bites this fall, her son has been able to experiment and explore using the fresh fruits and vegetables to create new recipes. He is using the produce as a tool to express his creativity in the kitchen. And hopefully he is charting the course to become a world famous chef! We love our jobs, and we love that we get to spend each day with sweet families who are dedicated to making their kids’ lives brighter by helping to nourish them with healthy, fresh food. At the end of each week we crash, exhausted from moving all that produce, but renewed and energized knowing that we provided brighter choices and brighter outlooks for our 1,800 Brighter Bites families!
Jacqueline Noyola ready to distribute delicious crunchy apple crisps!
Brighter Bites Expands to Dallas
Guess what?! Brighter Bites is expanding to Dallas. Meet Alicia and Meredith, our passionate “pear” of Brighter Biters (along with their wonderful interns, Saundra and Shilpa)! They’ll be working with the North Texas Food Bank to brighten the city this summer.
