Oak Park RIver Forest Food Pantry stays open despite blizzard
Feb 3, 2011
Surely no one would think there’s anything all that special about a plate of lasagna.
Cheese, spaghetti sauce, pasta, spices, and whatever personal touches from grandma’s cookbook, but nothing worth writing the Iron Chef or Wednesday Journal’s own foodie columnist Frank Chlumsky about.
On Wednesday evening, as buckets of snow fell upon the Chicago area – 18-inches in Oak Park — Michele Zurakowski and her staff dined on the Italian dish. It was brought in that evening by their co-worker at the Oak Park River Forest Food Pantry—a well-deserved meal for a smaller-than-usual staff who chose to work Wednesday during one of the worst blizzards of record in the city.
The Tuesday evening before—as the storm began to pick up steam—Zurakowski, the pantry’s director of operations, and her staff was faced with a tough decision: open the pantry up on its normal, first Wednesday evening of the month or shut it down. They decided to go ahead and open at 7 p.m., and serve whoever showed up. Click here for full story.