Things are cooking...

New Volunteers & New Hours
The Beacon Youth Centre is proud to welcome two new volunteers, husband and wife Chuck and Joan.  We can now open an extra day and have chosen Wednesday as a good choice for the kids to come at lunch.   The result is we are open Tuesday to Friday 11:00 to 1:00 and Tuesdays & Thursdays from 7 - 9 PM.  Joan is a retired teacher and Chuck retired from the RCMP.
Do we see a pattern here?  God is giving us lots of retired cops and teachers... Makes me wonder what is coming around the corner...

Joan is one of our newest volunteers

Cooking classes!  Our night-time crowd at the Beacon is getting a special bonus as Pat Stuckless of the HKPRD Health Unit is teaching cooking classes several evenings this month. Pat brings lots of expertise on kitchen sanitation and clean food preparation, menu planning, healthy food choices and basic culinary skills. She's great with a knife too.  She has all the utensils, machines, openers, cutting boards, bowls, dishes, lids, spices and basic ingredients to make a healthy and tasty meal.

Pat shows how to prepare the pizza dough

The first evening featured pizza, and Pat made sure the kids mixed and rolled out their own dough, and even put cheese under the edge of the crust. Yum!  The kids cut piles of healthy stuff and mixed the sauce and spices, cut the cheese (so, who cut the cheese?) and spread everything out. Several kinds of meat, anchovies, and even black olives added variety.    Someone even got a few pieces of pineapple put onto their section of the pizza.

The second night session was on snack foods such as tortilla chips and dips, nacho ingredients and fruit salad. Two of the boys made a fancy bowl from a whole watermelon and most of it stayed together... Lentils and beans made up the protein portions, but some individuals insisted they wanted meat.
After the tortillas and salads we had flavoured popcorn.
Lots of good stuff.




Count on Blacksmith Rick to bring us some portable hands-on steel smithy work in weeks to come, as a follow up to the practical cooking classes we are seeing happen here.  Rick can put a forge and some useful tools on a trailer and bring them to our parking lot for some of our evening teens to hammer on. 
I don't know what we'll be making, but I know it will be interesting.

Joan, Rick and Frances... cooking   

Bike for The Beacon
Plans are underway for the first annual Bike For the Beacon motorcycle rally.  Yours truly still needs to get permission from the municipal council to have the parking lot filled with noisy bikes, the air filled with smoke and Bar B Q aroma, and the airwaves filled with the dulcet strains of amped-up rock music from some local able musicians.  Hey! We will even sell T shirts. Yeah!
My son Dan has designed several versions of the design below, which will be printed in white on black T-shirts.

Pre-order a shirt from me

The Bike For Beacon  Ride For Youth will take place on Saturday May 31st (God willing & if we get permission)  at 9:00 (registration) at the Beacon parking lot. Return for Bar B Q will be around 3:00 PM 
$20 for riders $10 for those riding pillion.
The ride will be all over the beautiful twisty and hilly roads of the Northumberland Hills and will return at 3:00 PM.

Rain Date will be June 7th.  

Mark your calendars and shine up the bikes!