(bright music) (lively upbeat jazz music) - Where are all the cookies?

- Somebody already ate 'em.

(chuckles) - Can we make some more?

- Come on in.

- We can always make more.

- [Rachel] From home-baked sweets in Columbia City to a complimentary cooking class and cafe at the Ballard Food Bank, there is plenty of love and care behind keeping Seattle fed.

Whether it's a much needed meal, or just a treat to perk up your day.

I'm Rachel Belle, host of "Your Last Meal" podcast, cookbook author and longtime journalist.

Today on "The Nosh," we are cooking with kindness.

(upbeat conga music) - All right, it's cookie time.

- It's cookie time, it's cookie time!

- Do you want an apron?

- Yeah, I want to belong.

I wanna look like everyone else.

- Apron club.

- I'm gonna be in the Apron Club.

- We are making some like chewy sugar cookies that have lemon zest and lemon juice and candied lemon peel.

Ooh, yay, lemon is my favorite.

- Well, you're in the right place.

- Okay.

- Can I trust you with the lemon zester?

- Girl, I have one of these at home.

I can do it, I can do it.

- Okay, let's get in there.

- Get in, coach.

- Lanne Stoffer started Seattle's first Little Free Bakery outside her home in Magnolia, and she quickly convinced her friend, cookbook author, Jill Lightner, to start baking for her neighbors.

So when did you start Little Free Bakery and what was the idea behind it?

- I started my Little Free Bakery in October three and a half years ago.

- Which I think is the first in the country.

- Yes.

- Wow.

Pretty cool.

Cool thing to come outta Seattle.

It was the tail end of the pandemic or so we thought, but it was fall down period.

I mean, people were getting sick again and people were feeling frightened again.

And I just wanted to do something to put a little joy out into the world because things felt so scary.

I said, "What can I do to make somebody's day better?"

And I love to bake.

And now I make a hundred items every Tuesday.

- Lanne's the one who bakes with love.

I bake with like stress and anxiety.

It took Lanne like five minutes- - To convince you.

- To convince me.

Right.

- And so what was the initial response the first time that you did this?

- I think that the pies were gone within an hour and a half.

- Wow.

- Yeah.

And now, now it's hard for them to last even 45 minutes.

It's kind of wild.

(laughs) - And restores your faith in humanity that people will take a treat from someone that they don't know.

- It's actually a really wonderful experiment in loving each other.

- It's like the sharing economy.

This isn't marketing, this isn't, I'm not gonna open a bakery.

We are just giving away cookies to the neighbors because it's something we both love to bake for different reasons.

And it turns out that our neighbors love to eat whatever it is that we happen to be baking.

And so it like it's a mutual aid thing, right?

Like I get something out of it.

They get something out of it.

- And I really believe if everybody shared resources that there would always be enough.

And for me, what I can share is what I can bake, and I have enough and I'll continue to do it as long as I can.

(people laugh) - You're baking a revolution!

- Baking a revolution.

That's my goal.

(people laugh) - Well, speaking of, should we put these in the oven?

- Yes.

- Should we bake a little revolution here?

- Yes.

- Okay.

(upbeat jaunty music) - Cheers.

- Cheers.

- [All] Mm.

Oh my god.

It's so soft.

- That's more tender than my heart.

(laughs) - Your neighbors are very lucky.

(chuckles) (upbeat jaunty music) The Ballard Food Bank isn't set up like a typical soup kitchen.

Instead of handing out bags of random groceries, clients get to pick out their own food in a store-like setting.

More than a thousand diverse scratch cooked meals are served daily in a cheerful cafe and they offer a free monthly cooking class.

- Are we ready to start our food preparation part of this course?

Right now, we are going to go ahead and just squeeze our lemon juice all over the top.

- Whoa!

- Sorry about that.

- Yeah.

I'm in the splash zone.

- If I had to only eat one food for the rest of my life- - It would be peanut butter?

- I think I eat it with a spoon more than I eat it on anything.

I helped Kindness Cafe manager, Natalie Schwartz, make PB+J's that folks could take to go.

What is the Kindness Cafe and what sets you apart?

- As of a few months ago, we were the only cafe within a food bank.

- Mm.

- In the US, which is- - Really?

- Really cool.

Yes.

- Wow.

- People come in while they're waiting to shop, they can sit here and eat their food, grab a coffee, grab a tea.

There's outlets for charging their laptop or their phone.

So it's like going to a coffee shop.

- So having this grocery store to shop in is very different than coming by and just getting a bag of kind of mystery groceries.

- Yeah.

- And it's all about dignity.

- Absolutely.

- Right?

And you're using high quality food and making some interesting and delicious food.

- We are.

- This is our squash soup prep.

So right now we are roasting our squashes so that we can go ahead and scoop out the flesh of those to put into our soup pot.

- It's so special to have guest chefs or other community members.

Like this is a community kitchen where everybody is welcome to cook.

- [Host] So who are the people who are coming to these classes?

- Class is open to every client.

There's no restriction on that.

People are coming for different reasons and have certainly different backgrounds.

Some of our clients have access to kitchens for the first time in years.

And we wanted to be able to bolster the skills that they used to have or maybe never had and want to have now that they have kitchen space.

- So for the onions, we're gonna be chopping off their heads and their butts again.

- [Owner] There's a lot of different reasons people show up, which is really cool.

- How do you decide what to serve in a cooking class like this?

- One of the things is like what is in the food bank?

We wanna be teaching people to cook things that they have access to with our kitchen.

Our number one goal is to treat everybody with kindness and respect, because this might be the only interaction they have today.

- Right.

- This might be the only meal they get to get today.

(soft music) - Mm.

It kind of tastes like pumpkin pie, but a soup.

- It does.

Yeah.

(soft music) - 1, 2, 3.

- [Both] Oh!

(both laugh) - We got it.

- Yeah.

There we go.

- That one looks, that's the best one we've done so far.

- I agree.

- It looks really good.

- Yeah, it's perfect.

- [Announcer] "The Nosh" was made possible in part with the generous support of Alaska Airlines.