A Menu for Hope

Our
fashionably
late
entry…

I’ll admit I hadn’t heard of A Menu for Hope until just this week. Last January, when food bloggers raised money for tsunami relief, Belly Timber was four months from birth; an item on our to-do list, constantly shoved below “pack for the island” and “get all the damn laundry done, for once.”

So, I was quite stoked to discover that we can still join in this year, even if we’re fashionably late.

What is this year’s A Menu for Hope? It’s the international food blogging community’s campaign to raise money for earthquake relief in Pakistan. October’s devastating earthquake in Kashmir registered 7.6 on the Richter scale and the death toll stands near 87,000 with another 80,000 injured and 3.3 million left homeless. And with winter coming on (and the potential for more disasters — a 6.7 quake hit the remote Kush region of neighboring Afghanistan just this morning — further relief is urgent.

So, we bring you A Menu for Hope II. Head on over to Chez Pim, where Pim, the gracious hostess and coordinator of this event has gathered together an impressive list of gifts from food bloggers around the world. A donation of as little as $5 puts you in the running for one of these gifts, and trust me, this isn’t just landing another travel mug from Public Radio; there’s some amazing stuff here.

All the proceeds go to Unicef through the Firstgiving website, and the fund will be earmarked for the victims of the Kashmir earthquake. In just two days, Menu for Hope’s raised over $5000, and we’ve got till December 23rd to donate. The generosity of this community is simply outstanding.

And meanwhile, what’s Belly Timber adding to the mix?

Well, because we’re a little stir crazy on this rock, and we can’t snag any hip, big city gifts for our prizewinner, we’d like to offer up…

Belly Timber’s Island Insanity Gift Package

The exact contents of the package will be a mystery (oh, come on, we all love surprises), but we can promise the following (insane island) treats:

1. Culinary products from Pelindaba Lavender Farms. (Yes, people here are so strange, they have entire 20 acre farms devoted to a single herb.)

2. Jellies and sauces from our sister islands, Lopez and Orcas. (Now, how can you pass up a jar of Lopez Larry’s “soon to be famous”^TM Smokey Chardonnay Mustard Sauce? Yes, that is a ^TM next to the phrase “soon to be famous.” We assume the trademark will be changed once he becomes famous.)

3. And behind door number three? Here’s where the fun begins. The rest of the care package will be (we promise) home made, and could resemble anything from culinary delights from our kitchen to craft projects, Belly Timber style. (And Mrs. D has been known to get pretty crafty, given a pair of scissors, a stack of hand painted rice paper, and a carton of bottle caps. Okay, maybe not so much with the bottle caps, but trust me, Mrs. D likes to play with crafts a lot more than she likes to talk about herself in third person!)

So, there you have it: Vague but adventurous, kind of like the average day on San Juan Island!

Now, to put your name in the hopper for our gift, or for any one of the fabulous gifts on this year’s Menu for Hope, just follow these simple rules:

1. Find the gift you would like on the menu.
2. Go to A Menu for Hope II donation page and donate $5 or whatever sum you can spare.
3. Use the comment section of your donation form to indicate which gift(s) you would like to have. Each $5 donation will give you one chance at winning the prize of your choice. (Yes, if you donate more than $5, you are allowed to specify more than one prize.)
4. That’s it!

Menu for Hope II ends on December 23rd. Winners will be announced at Chez Pim after January 1st, 2006.

Please join us in helping a region in desperate need.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 at 3:43 pm and is filed under food blogging events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.