Dear BAISmag readers,
Do you ever find yourself hungry and broke on a Tuesday night? Then I know just the event for you: Conscious Kitchen, a delicious weekly vegan dinner cooked entirely with ingredients rescued from De Haagse Markt.
Every week, a group of volunteers goes to the market and picks up crates and crates of food that would otherwise go to waste. The next day, they cook it and serve it to a group of like-minded hungry Hagenaars, mostly students, many of whom are international. The dinner starts at 6.45 and ends at 9, and it comes at the cost of a small donation, starting from 6 euros. That is, unless you decide to help out: volunteers who take up one of the picking up, cooking, serving, or cleaning shifts eat for free. You can sign up for these shifts here.
The dinner takes place in the heart of The Hague, five minutes biking from Wijnhaven, at the ground floor of a big building that looks a bit like a haunted school, but inside is surprisingly cozy, furnished with big wooden tables and some very quirky looking, adorably mismatched chairs. The address is Helena van Doeverenplantsoen 3.
The menu changes every week, but it always includes three courses: a soup, a main course composed of several different dishes, and dessert. To give you an idea, a couple weeks ago the menu consisted of cauliflower soup, mango chutney, guacamole, roasted asparagus with couscous, baked potatoes and beans, a minty, very refreshing cucumber salad, and two delicious desserts, mango lassi and chia seeds pudding.
If the prospect of helping combat food waste by eating for (almost) free is not enough to convince you, maybe the social aspect of it will: Conscious Kitchen is also a great place to meet new friends. The event is designed in a way that really encourages socialization: the fact that everyone eats at the same time sitting at big tables makes these dinners the furthest thing possible from the solitary quick meals in front of the computer most of us are used to, especially as international students.
Oh, one last thing: if you decide to come, don’t forget to bring bags and containers, as the leftover ingredients and food are also available for collection, meaning that Conscious kitchen can potentially feed you for more than just one meal per week.
As the Dutchest of email senders would say at this point, I trust to have informed you sufficiently. See you next Tuesday, 6.45pm, at Helena van Doeverenplantsoen 3!
hungry regards,
A Conscious Kitchen enthusiast
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