The Sister, The Soup, And The Blue Door

I see the front door to the soup kitchen open as the first round of hungry faces begin to bustle their way inside. Awaiting is a free lunch in a small cafeteria-style setting with a seating area for about twenty people. The small yet welcoming space allows guests enough time to eat, but it doesn’t allude to the feeling that there is enough room for everyone to hang around too long.

 First in line is a mix of patrons I’d sort of expected to see; homeless individuals who’d parked their carts of belongings outside, prostitutes carrying their worldly possessions on their backs, and what looked like transients passing through town. What caught me off guard though was the unsettling mix of parents with children who’d arrived. The children looked like they should have likely been in school right now and the parents looked like they should have been at work. This latter group could have been any number of working-class people I’d bumped into in my past few days of travel. The person who served me at Tim Hortons, the person who took my money at the fuel station, or the cashier at the grocery store, but here they were between jobs, paychecks, or spells of luck.

Here at the Blue Door Soup Kitchen, no one asked why they were there or where they’d come from. The volunteers just smiled, explained today's menu, and helped facilitate the lunch.

There is more to Canadian culture and cuisine than steaks, salmon, and tree sap. There is the highly under-recognized culture of Canadian volunteers who quietly offer up their valuable time and those that they serve. I’d come here to see who some of those people were, why they do what they do, and well, what kind of food comes out of their kitchen. What I found could not have been more different then what I was expecting.  

A traditional mining town, Sudbury is not immune to the economic booms and busts of the mining industry. In 1982 a local volunteer at the Christ the King Catholic Church, Kaireen Crichton, who had been handling the Church’s books as well as handing out lunches to those in need noticed a growing demand for a regular food service and decided she could do more. Kaireen put her idea into action and with the help of Father Brian McKee (who provided space in the back of his store), and a soup kitchen was opened.

No easy feat, the soup kitchen was constantly under pressure from health inspectors to meet the local regulations and Kaireen and husband Roger relied heavily on picking up donations from local grocery stores to help with food supply. With the intention to treat everyone as a welcome guest and not judge their situations, the kitchen prevailed and more than 30 years later they hand out over 3500 meals a month!

I arrived at the back entrance on my motorbike, parked between a delivery truck and a garbage bin, and headed inside. Expecting to meet a group of humdrum volunteers who were there logging hours for community service, thawing frozen soups, and spreading cheez whiz between layers of expired Wonder Bread – I unexpectedly uncovered a standard of service more in line with any premium dining establishment. The welcoming team were well-organized culinary creators, chopping fresh vegetables and putting the final touches on freshly baked desserts.

In all, nine separate people were diligently prepping for today's menu as well as getting ready for the upcoming week. At the helm of this organization a delegate of the almighty himself, Sister Nicole. An unbelievably pleasant and friendly woman in her 70s, Sister Nicole is easy to spot in her bronze skirt, navy shirt, blue apron, and trademark black and white wimple atop her head. 

As friendly as she is efficient, Sister Nicole quickly gets me working on a project with her so as not to waste any time during my interview. To start we are making bread pudding, Sister Nicole-style. The recipe consists of seven dozen eggs, a couple of racks of cinnamon raisin bread, only one jug of milk, and some fresh orange juice they need to use up. She asks me if I’ve ever seen the show MasterChef, specifically when they have a black box challenge. Yes, I know that challenge quite well, I respond. Well, she says, every day here is like a MasterChef black box challenge. We never know what ingredients we are going to have to work with, but we still need to create wholesome meals for everyone to enjoy. The one difference is, that I try not to make things look too fancy or no one will eat them.

Sister Nicole goes on to explain that the one jug of milk we have isn’t going to be enough to make the bread pudding recipe for the estimated 150 guests today. However, she does have an abundance of fresh orange juice right now and is going to offset the lack of milk with the orange juice to sweeten up the dessert and give it a bit of a creamsicle flavor. For a guy who spent his life in kitchens starting at the age of 13 under the tutelage of a Greek immigrant who wasn't about to let a single carrot go to waste. The challenge of constantly turning every leftover ingredient into a lunch special so as to never waste a thing is impressive. I have a place in my heart for this lady already.

While I’m slicing cinnamon raisin bread into cubes we get to chatting about how this remarkable lady ended up in this remarkable kitchen. 

Through an adorable French-Canadian accent, Sister Nicole explains that she started here in 2009 when she retired from teaching school. Her background included teaching sciences and religion at the local Collège Notre-Dame and at a Catholic French school where she taught for 21 years! Her helpful and kind nature was always evident, even during her teaching career. Sometimes during school, she would organize the kids to do a bake sale the day before report cards, then sell the parents the goodies when they came to meet the teacher. She would take these proceeds and buy ingredients to do a spaghetti and meat sauce lunch which she would then prepare with the kids and bring down to Blue Door to give out to those in need. She says those kids are all grown-up with families of their own now and still come back from time to time to help out at Blue Door. 

Before this, Sister Nicole was in Ottawa. At that time she was asked to go into the homes of people and help them budget their finances and food. Her and the family would organize food donations once a week from a food bank and she would help them to organize a food budget based on what they had available. It seems she has always had a real knack for making a lot out of a little. 

Later in life, she entered the convent. At the time she says she only had a grade 10 education, but opted to go back to school where she got her Bachelor's degree in science in Sudbury and did a Master's in education. I’m thinking to myself, a Sister with a science degree, this is a lady with an open mind!

 Sister Nicole says she really enjoyed teaching; When you teach you help prepare tomorrow's society. 

With no formal culinary training, but a wealth of real-world knowledge, Sister Nicole says that her training was by experience. One of those experiences was when she lived in a house for a year in a residence with 52 sisters and 36 girls where she helped make breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for this group of 88 people. That experience combined with growing up in a house with fourteen kids in her family meant you were given a lot of responsibility. By nine she’d been taught how to cook steak and by eleven she was making Sunday chicken dinners for the whole family. Her mom said matter of factly, This Sunday I will help you make the family meal, after that you are on your own. When was the last time you saw a nine year old cooking steak or an eleven year old making a family meal for sixteen people!?

Trying to get a feel for what else goes on in the daily black box challenge here at the Blue Door, I start smelling around to see what else is cooking. I spot Mark, a friendly guy who’d shook my hand on the way in. He was sporting one of Blue Door’s trademark blue aprons and stirring a large pot over a gas stove. I ask Mark what’s cooking?

Mark tells me that a large number of donations come from a premium grocery store chain in the city, Smiths Market. The store's food quality standard is so high they often get fruits, meats, and other foods with minor blemishes or packaging damage. Today Mark and his sister (his actual sister, who is also volunteering), had taken beef roasts, sausages, and ground pork, and turned them into a ragu for one dish. Then, with the rest of the meat, they made chili. 

By now, I’m halfway through a small bowl of chili. After a few bites, I look at him and look at the chili. Wait, I ask him, this does not taste like today’s chili.

 To make a really good chili you need to make it and let it sit for a few days allowing the flavors to mingle, then heat it back up and serve it. Is this today’s chili? I ask. Mark laughs a bit as if to say, who cooks and serves chili on the same day? Then reassures me that he made it a few days earlier. Wow, I’m eating chili made of premium cuts of meat from one of the city's premium grocery stores that has been prepared to a restaurant standard! The food they give away is better than the food that’s in my fridge. 

Noticing my general enthusiasm for what’s going on around me, longtime Blue Door representative Bill comes over to my bread pudding station to see how I’m getting on. It was Bill’s aunt Kaireen and husband Roger who started it all and Bill is happy to carry on the family tradition. I asked Bill what some of the challenges are to running a soup kitchen; as you might imagine there are as many unforeseen challenges inside the operation as people that walk through the door.

Bill tells me that sometimes people's best intentions actually cause more harm than good and once the pandemic hit, a whole new list of issues started to arise. Not only did people's addictions spike alongside demand for their service but the Blue Door could not operate as usual. To add unforeseen insult to injury, locals started bringing coffee and doughnuts down to the same area they operate from thinking they were helping out. However, Bill knows his clients well, and feeding a steady diet of sugar to people who are addicts is like pouring gasoline on a fire. Their home cooked meals were starting to be replaced by doughnuts and caffeine, compounding their already unstable health issues.

 At other times community businesses would organize free BBQs, without consulting them. Looking to mix up their daily routines, clients will go to the BBQ and the Blue Door will have meals for 150+ people gone to waste. Much like the free doughnuts, a good deed can have a side-effect when not handled correctly or with no communication about their plans.  

    Bill is quite proud of all they do around here, the volunteers that come on a regular basis as well as club volunteers from groups like Rotary. I get the impression that overall the community is quite supportive. While the guests file in and out of the building I ask what happens once these people become seniors as this life must be hard when you are in your twenties, let alone when you’re in your sixties and older. Like a mic drop, the answer is a grim reminder that the lives of those who need this service are often as hard as they look. Bill replies; These people don’t usually make it to 65....

    As my bread pudding duties wrap up I spot Sister Nicole in the corner with a large bucket braced between her feet and a 15lb Robot Coupe MP 450 Turbo 18” immersion blender whizzing up a colorful liquid. She sets the blender down and at seventy-six years old, hauls the bucket up onto the table like an unphased workhorse. With an abundance of fresh fruits in the fridge she’s decided to add to the menu a little aperitivo if you will. A fresh smoothie to start off today's guests. She likes to sneak in as many fresh fruits as possible into her guests' diets but says if it's just some fruit on the table they won’t eat it. She’s also learned that if the smoothies look too green, they won’t drink them. Like any good dining establishment, you need to know your clientele.  

    Our final challenge for the day was what to do with 30lbs of premium Lindt Valentine chocolates wrapped up in heart-shaped red wrapping that had been donated. Without skipping a beat, Sister Nicole hatches a plan to use up an abundance of Graham crackers they had and make dessert for tomorrow. I still can’t believe the ingredients around here. Premium prime cuts of meat, fresh fruits, select vegetables, and now I’m staring down $250 in Milk Chocolate LINDOR Hearts. The retail value alone would prevent these ingredients from ending up in the walk-in cooler of most mom-and-pop food operations.  

    A few of us get to unwrapping the chocolates and place them side by side on a large baking sheet atop crumbled Graham crackers. While the odd one ends up in my mouth for quality control, they are popped into the oven when ready, and just like that LINDOR milk chocolate and Graham cracker squares are on the menu. 

Sister Nicole then hands me a warm slice of bread pudding fresh from the oven and onto the table comes a huge four litre jug of boutique maple syrup that had been donated from a local company in Noëlville just up the road. The syrup is now the dip for the bread pudding.  The Blue Door Soup Kitchen was more like a 3-star cafe with a smoothie bar and daily black box menu with $0.00 written next to the menu items…it was incredible!

Like a lot of things around here, my timing is bittersweet. After fourteen years of service at the Blue Door, Sister Nicole has a calling for a new challenge. A month after our meeting she’s headed back to Ottawa to rest up a bit and spend some time working in a home for around 150 sisters. This group of life-long servants are in need of some service themselves with health issues like Alzheimer's and various other ailments. Sister Nicole says she’s hoping to help out or even just sit and talk to them as she feels she might be easier to relate to than a typical nurse.

    An establishment named for the blue color that can always be seen on the Virgin Mary. When walking through the door it certainly feels like something unexplainable has pulled people here. And for everything to be done under the watchful eye of a smiling Sister, some coincidences are too coincidental.

    If you’re driving through Sudbury and looking to volunteer or just looking for a place to donate some extra dollars. The Blue Door Soup Kitchen is the door I recommend donating to or walking through.

You can find them at Blue Door Soup Kitchen. 
Sudbury Ontario 705-675-5300. BlueDoorSoup.ca.

Recipe
Sister Nicole's Heavenly Graham Chocolate Squares. 

• 30lbs of Lindt Valentines' chocolates
  
• 5lbs Butter or Margarine
  
• 50lbs Graham Cracker crumbs
  
• 4 TBSP Cinnamon (optional)
  
• Ample serving of love and compassion
  

Melt the butter or margarine and mix with graham cracker crumbs to form a base. The mix should be just wet enough to hold the mix together. 
Spray or rub a large commercial baking sheet (18x26”) with non-stick spray or margarine.
Press the mix onto the sheet to about ½” thick. Use a rolling pin with parchment paper on top of the crumb mix to make it more even.
If desired, sprinkle the crumbs with cinnamon.
Bake the crumb base at 350oF for 6-8 mins or until the crust is lightly firm. Then unwrap and place room-temperature chocolate hearts about 1” apart. Put back in the oven for a further 4-5 minutes or until melted, then place on a rack allowing to cool before cutting into squares.
Serves around 150 people.