Community Inspiration

"Hello favourite friends -- I delivered a ton of frozen family-size lasagnas today. Now, this is not a problem by any means, lol. But you have a diehard, full Italian lasagna lover living in your town."

"If any of you want some fresh homemade, no-calorie-counting lasagna, please let me know and I will gladly prepare it."

"The world as we know it is falling apart, but my two little hands are capable of making a difference. I can't change the world, but I can make lasagna."

"I'll bet I could continue this for the rest of my life. I love creating in the kitchen, but more importantly, I love the people I've met."

"When word got out on social media, people from all over the world started donating to my cause. It's a pan of love. A lot of the people I make lasagna for have lost their jobs, and this is my way of saying, 'I understand and I'm here for you'."

"Those warm smells help people to know that somebody cares about them. You can be in the most awful place in your life, and then a big plate of lasagna will provide some peace and hope."

Michelle Brenner, Gig Harbor, Washington

GIG HARBOR, Wash. — In the picturesque city of Gig Harbor, there's one meal that has everyone talking: Michelle Brenner's homemade lasagna. “This is by no means a diet lasagna,” she says. “I tell people do not get on the scale the next day.”

Michelle Brenner, 44, worked at a menswear store in her town, Gig Harbor, and then she was furloughed when everything closed down in a defensive move against the entry of the highly contagious novel coronavirus into the United States, threatening to devastate entire communities. She did what most people instinctively did when she was left with little option but to burrow into the confines of her home. Food, comfort food comes to mind. And for her, comfort food was what she helped her Italian grandmother prepare, when she was a little girl.

Memory of her grandmother preparing the spaghetti sauce, meatballs and lasagna she was allowed to help with in her grandmother's kitchen, flooded her mind. Like most of us when things go dreadfully wrong and depression sets in, we look for rescue, a way to lift that bleak, dark mood, and she found the solution in what she calls "a pan of love", the methodical preparation of an ethnic dish that everyone loves; a combination of pasta, cheese, ground beef and tomato sauce. It fit the bill for encouraging her to feel better about the situation roiling the world and her world in particular.

She decided she would use the stimulus cheque of $1,200 that people in her situation received in an effort to lift people out of instant poverty with job losses that resulted from lockdown. With that money she funded the purchase of lasagna ingredients to enable her to respond to the requests that began to arrive, in response to her communication to her community when she offered to supply anyone wanting it, with a pan of fresh-made lasagna.

Credit: King TV

At first it was friends and neighbours, and then it expanded to people outside her direct neighbourhood, and people just kept coming to take advantage of her offer. Three months on, she figured she had doled out 1,200 pans of lasagna. She employed herself eight hours daily, seven days a week to help feed people in need, by boiling noodles cooking ground beef, preparing tomato sauce and layering it all with mozzarella, ricotta and Parmesan. Delectable and nutritious. And she felt good about it all, being busy with her production schedule, knowing it benefited people in need.

She had set up a pantry in her front yard so people could simply pick up a lasagna dish ready to be placed in the oven at their own home. Then she began to receive so many requests she had difficulty keeping the lasagna constituents in stock. The Gig Harbor Sportsman's Club offered to help, enabling her to use their kitchen. "We saw what a great thing she was doing, and we have this nice commercial kitchen that wasn't being used because of COVID", explained the club's president.

Soon, Michelle Brenner started a fundraiser on Facebook that collected over $10,000 to allow her to continue making lasagna as giveaways. People began donating what they could afford when picking up their orders. To the present, she said, $22,000 has been contributed to enable her "to be making lasagna for many months to come". 

Credit: Lori Thiel/Facebook    Doctors at Swedish Edmonds with one of Michelle Brenner's Lasagna meals