Today’s Thank You Thursday honors two beautiful women, Helen Ashe and Ellen Turner, 82-year-old twin sisters who founded, and indeed operate the Love Kitchen, their heartfelt gift to needy residents on the east side of Knoxville. This wonderfully written story celebrates 25 years of Helen and Ellen caring and sharing their culinary talent and their amazing smiles. I’ve placed a small excerpt below but you’ll definitely want to click through to Smoky Mountain Living to read the glowing account of their amazing lives and the gifts of love that they and their volunteers pass on to the less advantaged folks of Knoxville.
T. Wayne Waters photo via Smoky Mountain Living. Love Kitchen founders Helen Ashe (left), Director, and twin sister Ellen Turner, Manager, are delighted to still be serving up food and love at the Love Kitchen after 25 years. – See more at: http://www.smliv.com/features/cooking-with-love/#sthash.GAftJUC3.dpuf
excerpt: It’s a little past 8 a.m. on a Wednesday morning and 82-year-old twin sisters Helen Ashe and Ellen Turner are in the kitchen cracking eggs into wide-mouth wooden bowls. Brewing coffee infuses the air with an earthy aroma. Ellen gets a handheld electric mixer, plugs it in, and dips its shiny beaters into the yellow egg yolks in the bowl. A soft whirring sound signals the start of scrambled eggs. Helen meanwhile turns her attention from the eggs to white rounds of biscuit dough she begins to lay out on a large metal tray.
The breakfast Helen and Ellen are fixing isn’t for them. It’s for the dozens of needy Knoxville folks who come to this special kitchen on the east side of the city—the Love Kitchen—twice a week for a free meal, for delivery to the hundreds of people in need who have no way to get to Love Kitchen, and for the hundreds more who come by and pick up much-needed emergency food bags. These meals, cooked with care by the sisters and their volunteer staff, are for the hungry, the homeless, the helpless, the hopeless, and the homebound as the sisters like to say. Helen and Ellen have been doing it for 25 years.
… It’s Sunday, and Helen Ashe’s and Ellen Turner’s “grandson” Patrick Riggins is up early to make the rounds picking up donated food from various grocery stores in Knoxville. He takes the food to the Love Kitchen and properly stores it at the charity organization’s facility. Often, he then tends to myriad other tasks that may include cleaning up, charting out the next day’s food deliveries or taking care of administrative paperwork.
“When people ask me where I go to church, I tell them I go to the Church of the Love Kitchen,” Riggins says with a chuckle. “I’m here at least a couple of hours every day, seven days a week, including Sunday. You can get a lot done when there’s no one else in here.”
On Wednesdays and Thursdays when the kitchen is in full operational mode, Riggins often is also called upon to help serve food and prepare food bags to hand out or deliver. Occasionally, he fills in for a delivery volunteer who can’t make it on a particular day. – read the complete article –
