Food (and Love) To Go
It’s hotter than a Carolina Reaper (the South Carolina chili pepper famed as the fieriest in the world) in the small au naturel kitchen at Sweetgrass Garden on Johns Island, but the group of teens and their kitchen mentors busy chopping and stirring various pots don’t seem to mind the swelter. They listen up as Justin Booher, culinary director of AMOR Healing Kitchen, gives his rundown about that week’s menu, including a primer on how to make a spring roll using shredded carrots and purple cabbage harvested earlier that day—something many of them have never done. While some perfect their rolling technique, others will be making a fresh juice concoction using health-potent turmeric and ginger, courtesy of local grower Spade & Clover, while at another cook station in the cozy, toasty kitchen, fresh snow peas get pummeled into hummus.
Much of AMOR Kitchen’s plant-based cooking involves produce and recipes new to both its kitchen staff—a hardy group of teenaged volunteers paired with adult mentors—and AMOR’s clients—cancer patients and those with serious health issues. After the teens cook up innovative healthy foods, AMOR’s Delivery Angels hit the road to bring to fresh meals to clients across the Charleston region.
“It’s amazing how many different things you can turn into hummus,” says Booher. “It’s a big part of our tool kit, because it’s soft and easy to eat and digest when made in a mild, flavorful way but still nutrient-dense and rich. Many of our clients suffer from mouth sores during chemotherapy or have digestion issues, so we take all that into account.”
Introducing their teen chefs and clients to new foods and expanding their culinary repertoire is part of the fun for Booher and AMOR’s founder, Maria Kelly, a former high school Spanish teacher and an educator at heart.
“I absolutely loved teaching. In my classroom I was always talking about food with my students, helping them understand what they were putting in their bodies,” says Kelly. When students brought snacks to her class, she’d give the green light only if the students could pronounce the ingredients. Kelly, also an avid yogi and surfer, has a boundless smile that amps up her already strong teen-likability factor (i.e., she can get away with snack patrol).
“If they couldn’t pronounce it, then they probably had no idea what it was,” she says.
Kelly’s love of good food comes from her mother, a university professor and “phenomenal cook” who served dinner every night at 6:30 sharp. She taught Kelly the importance of cooking with real ingredients.
“It wasn’t necessarily fancy cooking, but it was always delicious. My friends would come over and no one ever left hungry,” Kelly says.
After her mother was diagnosed with cancer in 2007, Kelly began to better understand the healing power of cooking—for both of them.
“When she wasn’t feeling well, I took her food,” she says. “It was as much about the comfort I was giving her, the fact that I took the time to cook and bring healthy food over.”
After her mother’s death in 2010, Kelly continued teaching and pursuing her own personal healthy eating journey. She became a vegetarian while an undergrad at the College of Charleston, where she majored in International Business and Spanish.
“My roommate was a vegetarian, so I started eating less meat by default. I’d always had asthma and eczema, and when I changed my diet, I noticed those conditions improved,” she says.
She started learning more about the food industry, joined a local CSA, and in 1999, decided to stop eating meat altogether. In the past few years, she’s cut out dairy as well, “and now I have zero asthma and eczema,” Kelly says. “I’m not dogmatic. I don’t make claims that this is for everybody, but it’s worked for me.”
The idea for AMOR came to her in the classroom one day, during a news segment she was playing for her students that included mention of the Ceres Community Project in California. At Ceres, teens learned culinary skills while preparing healthy meals for cancer patients.
“I thought, oh my goodness, this speaks to everything I love,” she says.
In May 2017, Kelly took a leap and left the classroom to launch AMOR Healing Kitchen as her version of the Ceres-inspired program (“Amor” means love in Spanish). By February 2018, she’d gotten her 501(c)(3) nonprofit status and completed all necessary food service certifications, and had even found the ideal (if unair-conditioned) affordable kitchen space that she’d envisioned—“I dreamed of being on a farm or garden, where the kids could see the food growing”—and AMOR was off the ground. An apiary of honeybees buzzes just 30 yards from the kitchen, and Sweetgrass Garden’s herbs and vegetables grow outside the windows.
“It’s more than perfect,” Kelly says.
Today AMOR offers a series of eight- to 16-week plant-based meal delivery packages to clients undergoing cancer treatment or who get medically referred to the program. Two shifts of nine teen volunteers at a time man the kitchen one day each week, earning service hours for school while honing their culinary and teamwork skills and learning about healthy food. Clients receive a weekly delivery that provides enough to feed the patient and a caregiver three meals (more if they’re savvy about stretching it), and includes nine items: three entrées , three sides that pair with the entrées ; a soup, a salad, a juice and a dessert, all 100% plant based.
“We do as much as we can to push a biodiverse diet for our clients,” says Booher.
Many clients qualify for free deliveries, and others are gifted to them by friends or loved ones. But it’s a scrappy, bootstrap operation.
“We’re learning as we go,” says Kelly, who hopes to expand fundraising and grant opportunities, in order to double AMOR’s capacity, now limited to about 15 to 20 clients at a time.
Some 80 patients to date have benefited from the program (many of them re-up for additional delivery series), and 45 volunteers, including the teen culinary assistants, adult kitchen mentors and delivery angels, make it all happen. Booher, who began as a volunteer and was hired part-time last spring, brings 11 years of culinary training and expertise to the organization, including a stint at a raw food kitchen in Arizona most recently serving as a manager at Edmund’s Oast. AMOR’s partners include the Charleston Parks Conservancy’s community garden program directed by Leslie Wade, which provides much of the kitchen’s fresh produce, as well as Spade & Clover, GrowFood Carolina and Roadside Blooms in North Charleston, which donates fresh flower bouquets to accompany each delivery.
“It’s so rewarding to see what different parts of the program are meaningful to different people,” says Kelly, who—ever the teacher—most loves working with the teens and seeing their confidence and their appreciation for healthy food grow. For one client, a widower whose wife used to always have fresh flowers in their home, the flowers from Roadside Blooms are the highlight. A menu that accompanies each delivery, listing all the farm sources with a blurb by a registered dietician, was another client’s favorite thing.
“One of our delivery angels brought one of the clients and his caregiver out to the farm because they wanted to meet Justin and thank him,” Kelly says. “Another client was hoping to come cook with us one day but didn’t feel up to it, so when she felt better, she made everyone cookies. It was just really special.”
For Josh Hayes, a Mt. Pleasant real estate broker with Stage 4 colon cancer, AMOR has been a godsend. Hayes was a CrossFit competitor and super-fit, super-healthy 43-year-old before an out-of-the-blue diagnosis turned his life upside down last February.
“If cancer can happen to me, it can happen to anybody,” he says, “so don’t ignore symptoms, even small ones.”
Due to his aggressive chemotherapy regimen, proper nutrition is vital.
“Diet is critical with my type of cancer, which is why AMOR has been so helpful. It eliminates one more thing I don’t have the energy to do,” he says. “I don’t have the most refined palate,” Hayes admits, “and Justin will go out on a limb and do something I’d never dream of, like a sweet potato and curry soup, then I taste it and it’s like ‘wow, this is awesome!’ They get really creative at making foods feel hearty and delicious without meat,” says Hayes. “I love AMOR delivery days, it’s like a celebration.”
AMOR is hosting their 2nd Annual Hoedown on October 19th featuring all things fall: Bluegrass, bonfires and pumpkins. Visit amorhealingkitchen.org to keep up to date with events and to learn more about the organization and volunteer opportunties.
