PORT ANGELES — Visitors can fill their bowls with fresh soup and tour a grocery-shopping-style market at the Port Angeles Food Bank’s inaugural Empty Bowls Fundraiser on Saturday.
The fundraiser will be at the food bank at 632 N. Oakbridge Drive from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. A variety of soups made with food bank ingredients will be served along with salad and rolls. Wine will be available for purchase.
Guests will be invited to tour The Market for a first-hand look at how it will provide free groceries once it opens in mid-September.
Tickets are $25 for entry and soup, with accompaniments. A $35 ticket also comes with a ceramic soup bowl featuring The Market logo to take home.
People also can enter to win raffle items from local businesses. Tickets are available online at www.portangelesfoodbank.org/empty-bowls.
Proceeds from the evening benefit the food bank’s Friday Food Bag program, which sends food home with students so they won’t go hungry during weekends and school breaks, said Frances Howell, food bank board president.
Four soups will be offered, a Tomato Coconut Basil vegan and gluten-free soup; Cockaleekie, a traditional Scottish cream soup with roasted chicken, potatoes and leeks; a Black Bean soup, Caribbean-influenced, that is vegan and gluten-free, with black beans, root vegetables and chilies and garnished with a tomato cilantro relish; and a cup that will be based on whatever is in abundance in the coolers, likely a carrot soup, Howell said.
The food bank provides food to an estimated 50 percent of households in Port Angeles and some 20 percent of households countywide, Emily Dexter, executive director of the food bank, has said.
The grocery-store model allows clients to choose their own food. They are assigned points according to household size and shopped for what they needed, using the points like money. Healthier food choices cost fewer points.
Dexter had instituted this way of distributing food in 2019 but it was abandoned in March 2020 when the food bank switched to drive-though distribution to shield clients and staff from COVID-19.
Raffle prizes include a night at Juan de Fuca Cottages with private beach access, an adventure package for hiking Hurricane Ridge, coffee baskets from several local purveyors and a gift certificate for PNW Mobile Detailing, among others.
For more information, call the food bank at 360-452-8568 or email info@portangelesfoodbank.org.
