Boca Helping Hands Distributes Local Girl Scouts’ Cookbook

Analiesa Chavez and Kelsey Bonner worked for months to create a cookbook, containing recipes that can be made with common ingredients found in pantry bags of groceries distributed by Boca Helping Hands.

Both Chavez and Bonner are 14-year-old students at West Boca Raton Community High School while serving as Cadettes for Girl Scout Troop 20820. Their thoughtful cookbook has earned them the Girl Scouts Silver Award, the highest award a Cadette can receive.

“We were researching what initiative we could do to earn our Girl Scouts Silver Award, and we knew that we wanted to help those less fortunate than us,” Chavez said. “We knew about Boca Helping Hands through our troop. We came up with the idea of putting together a recipe book using common ingredients from the pantry bags and thought it would be a great way to help Boca Helping Hands clients.”

It took Bonner and Chavez four months of constant work and repeated volunteer time at Boca Helping Hands to curate their recipes. The most challenging aspect of this book was figuring out substitutions, as not every donation bag contains the same items.

“I’ve never really thought about people struggling with food- I always thought food was something people just had,” Bonner noted. “You hear about it [food insecurity], but you don’t quite understand it until you see it. This experience was definitely eye-opening, and it was nice to give back. It feels good that we can help people who are struggling at a time like this.”

Boca Helping Hands has four locations throughout Palm Beach County and work to distribute 80,000 pantry bags and 80,000 hot meals annually, six days per week.

“I’m a mom and I’m used to creating meals for a family of five, so I thought it would be easy for them, but there was a major learning curve,” Dawn Chavez, Annaliesa’s mom said. “They had to test the recipes to make sure they worked well with the ingredients in the pantry bags.”

The link to the cookbook can be found here: https://bocahelpinghands.org/news/bhh-recipe-book-girl-scouts