By Frank Mustac, Special Writer
PENNINGTON — Hundreds of Thanksgiving turkey dinners with fixings, plus hundreds more bag lunches, were prepared with love and care by students at Toll Gate and Timberlane schools, local Girl Scouts and Cub Scouts, pre-school children and community volunteers.
The dinner meals, numbering some 700 in total, along with about 600 bag lunches were delivered to the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen to serve to members of the community there on Thanksgiving Day.
“This is a project that the Toll Gate Grammar School community has been doing for 29 years,” said Dawn Berman, a parent volunteer and co-chair along with fellow Pennington resident Missy Cappucci of the committee that organizes the annual Toll Gate effort. “It’s a community-wide project,” she said.
On Monday morning, Ms. Berman and Ms. Cappucci were inside the Toll Gate school cafeteria with students mixing ingredients for sweet potato pies and pouring the mixtures into pre-made pie crusts. Classes took turns in the cafeteria making a portion of the 288 total pies. Third-graders from Deanna Provenzano’s class and kindergartens taught by Mary Seery took a morning shift in the 10 o’clock hour.
Monday is a “baking day” for the TASK Thanksgiving meal project, Ms. Berman said, while Tuesday is “carving day” when about 80 cooked turkeys from members of the community are delivered to the same cafeteria and then carved up by adult volunteers, usually dads, as part of the prepared meals donated to TASK.
While Toll Gate students and their families collected the ingredients for the pies as well as other food items featured in the Thanksgiving meals, Girl Scouts baked cornbread, Cub Scouts decorated lunch bags, and middle school students packed the lunches that also contained Halloween candy donated by Toll Gate students.
On Tuesday evening, the pies were boxed and loaded into a truck along with the prepared meals and lunches, some frozen turkeys and other food items. On Wednesday morning, volunteers accompanied the truck to Trenton to help unload the delicious cargo.
“Every year, a lucky third-grade class gets to go to TASK on Wednesday morning,” Ms. Cappucci said. “There, they decorate the dining area and make it beautiful.”
Besides Thanksgiving, Ms. Berman said, the Toll Gate community participates five other times a year on projects with the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen.
