Each Wednesday evening, upwards of 100 people line up on a sidewalk adjoining Tucson’s Armory Park for a hot meal served in heaping portions from steaming containers lined up on a folding table.
It’s a bounty of food offered to an unhoused community that is often food insecure — and each week the food for Community Care Tucson’s weekly distribution is prepared in a small handful of home kitchens. In early July, amid the dog days of summer, one of those is the home kitchen of Ash Fortune, a longtime volunteer and career kitchen worker who has perfected the art of cooking batch meals to appeal to a broad range of diners.
“It feels important to give back, to be aware of how lucky and privileged I am to not be worried about my next meal,” says Fortune, who has cooked for the distribution nearly every week for the past two years.
It’s a glimpse into one part of the labor behind Tucson’s mutual aid network, through which a handful of different groups provide food, clothing and sometimes medical care in different areas around the city.
”We can all just do things — you can just get together with your friends and start addressing the needs you see in your community,” Fortune says.
Noon: Making a shopping list
Fortune leans over the counter of her kitchen and looks down at her shopping list. “I think 3 pounds of butter is good,” she muses. “Or maybe 4?”
A 1920s kitchen with modern day appliances in Armory Park is where the magic happens. “My workspace,” she says.
Then it’s time to go to Restaurant Depot, where she gets about 40 pounds of frozen chicken, a bunch of boxes of frozen green beans and, crucially, butter. The total cost is $265, paid for by Fortune with the support of her partner’s steady job. “Butter was the big ticket item today,” she says.
Another household will be preparing some 50 pounds of potatoes plus rice and beans as Fortune gets going on the chicken and green beans; a group of people also makes about 200 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every week.
Vegetables aren’t always popular, but today’s green beans are going to get the star treatment. “The veggie side I bring will probably be drenched in garlic butter.”
1:35 p.m.
The first vat of light salted water goes on to boil for vegetables as Fortune rinses the chicken. There will be three trays of chicken, each of which will hold 20 pounds of meat. Fortune seasons the chicken with zeal: whole Mexican oregano, black pepper, chili powder, cumin, garlic and vegetable salt.
“I measure with feeling in my heart,” she laughs.
Then the chicken slides into the oven to cook for the next hour and she sanitizes the countertops. If there wasn’t a reporter and photographer in the room, Fortune says, she’d listen to an audiobook, maybe on local Indigenous history or about archaeology, with her headphones on.
2 p.m
As green beans are tipped into large metal vats boiling away on the stove, Fortune pours the animal fats into a plastic tin to be used later for gravy.
Then Fortune turns to the lemonade:
RECIPE: 5 GALLONS OF LEMONADE
8 cups of lemonade concentrate
8 cups of water
9 cups sugar
1 tablespoon of salt
Dissolved in 10 cups of hot water
Add the sugar water and 8 cups of lemon juice to the 5 gallon jug and fill the rest of the way with cold water
3 p.m.
The biggest challenge to working outside a commercial kitchen, says Fortune, is keeping the food at an appropriate holding temperature. To do that, she’s created an ad hoc steam table that is going alongside the vat of boiling green beans.
RECIPE: GRAVY FOR GREEN BEANS
Take 2-3 cups of fat drippings from baked chicken, and boil until shimmery
Add 3 tablespoons of flour to make a roux
Cook until the color darkens
Stir, then add vegetable stock
Simmer on low as the liquid continues to thicken
5:41 p.m.
It’s over 100 degrees outside, and the temperature inside is rising as well as the second batch of chicken continues cooking.
Fortune moves through it all smoothly, navigating the multiple dishes while also making lemonade and putting together a few extra containers of rice and beans to have on hand just in case they run out.
“It’s just awful to not have enough. It feels really bad,” she says.
There are less than two hours to go, and eight minutes left on the chicken. Fortune glances at the time on her phone anxiously.
6 p.m.
One hour until the distribution starts, and Fortune, with a sigh of relief, confirms the chicken is cooked. She pours the drippings into a pan and puts the green beans in the oven.
Then, wearing black gloves and wincing at the heat, she shreds the steaming chicken, and generously slathers it with barbecue sauce as she appraises the pan. “Juiciness to properly cooked-ness is the battle we are all fighting.”
7:30 p.m.
People are usually lined up before 7 p.m., when Community Care Tucson’s distribution formally starts, and they watch as the distribution tables unfurl from people’s trunks and backseats: there is a hot chocolate and coffee station, a wound care station and a pet care station.
By 7:38 p.m., Fortune has moved on to handing out the second pan of chicken.
8 p.m.
As people move through the line, some holding big backpacks or pulling carts and others leading dogs, Fortune is on the third tray of chicken and the 50 pounds of potatoes are almost done.
The table is also out of green beans.
Does she feel a sense of accomplishment?
“I think I do feel accomplishment if everyone gets fed,” she says. And that week, they did.
9 p.m.
At the end of the night, Fortune sends a photo of her workhorse kitchen.
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