At Manna House, where volunteers have been serving meals to the neediest and hungriest Baltimoreans for going on 60 years now, Chef Raheem Ajayi has to go with what he’s got, which explains the barbecued chicken, mashed potatoes and fresh coleslaw for Thursday morning breakfast.

Though appetizing in appearance and aroma, Ajayi’s barbecued chicken is not what most people would choose to eat between 8 and 10 a.m.

But when you’re preparing the only hearty meal many of your guests will have that day, you do the best you can with the donated produce and proteins available in your kitchen.

“Plus, there’s the price of eggs,” Ajayi says, citing another reason for the savory fare being served in the dining room on the morning I stop by. It takes up to 15 dozen scrambled eggs to feed the 80 to 100 guests, mostly men, who arrive each weekday morning at 435 East 25th Street.

The price of eggs remains relatively high, largely because of supply issues resulting from an avian flu that has eliminated millions of hens from the nation’s egg production. So, while Ajayi’s budget keeps him from offering a conventional breakfast to Manna House guests every day, he manages to cobble together a healthy meal from random donated ingredients. And he seems to thrive in the challenge.

“It’s like ‘Cutthroat Kitchen,’” he says, referring to the Food Network show that challenges chefs to make dishes from ingredients they gather from a pantry within a limited time.

At the Manna House kitchen, Ajayi faces a similar challenge, and meeting it seems very much in the spirit of the biblical reference to manna – the food God is said to have supplied the Israelites in their wilderness years.

Fresh Offerings

Sometimes Ajayi’s supply chain kicks into gear with a phone call or text from his buddies in food services.

He gets leftovers of pasta dishes, chili or chicken salad from Atwaters’ catered events. He gets surplus food, including soup, from Panera. Volunteers bring him baked goods from Weis Markets. He scores vegetables and meats, including ground bison, from MOM’s Organic Market and Sprouts Farmers Market.

“People don’t realize it, but we serve a lot of organic food,” he says proudly. “And I love fresh produce. We have a lot of canned vegetables in the pantry, but I prefer fresh.”

There was a pallet of 50-pound bags of Maine potatoes, donated by the United Methodist Church of Glen Burnie. The church conducts an annual Potato Drop, distributing thousands of pounds of potatoes it receives through the Society of St. Andrew’s farm-gleaning operation.

“The church gets a truck full of potatoes,” says Ajayi, “and then they reach out to various soup kitchens and non-profits in the area, and you just go down and pick them up.”

Bread from Cheesecake Factory, chicken salad from Atwaters, a pallet of 50-pound bags of Maine potatoes from a church’s annual Potato Drop.

During my visit, Ajayi had a bin of bread from the Cheesecake Factory slated to become croutons for his salads. Stacked high in the Manna House freezer were several boxes of brisket.

Brisket, Anyone?

“Yeah, 1,300 pounds of brisket,” Ajayi says. That, you might say, was manna from heaven — or, at least, Canada.

“I got a message from our voicemail,” Ajayi says. “Somebody said they want to donate brisket, and it’s 1,300 pounds. It took me about a week of phone tag and finally I got hold of someone. It was [a representative of] Sure Good Foods, based out of Canada. He says they have 1,300 pounds of brisket that’s in Baltimore that they just want to donate. It’s frozen in storage [in a warehouse on Holabird Avenue], and they were paying to store it.”

The meat was supposed to go to supermarkets in Delaware but, for some reason, it was considered surplus – to Manna House’s benefit.

Ajayi is still contemplating what he’ll do with all that beef; he’s thinking brisket sandwiches might be good. As for the lamb sausage in the freezer, he’s thinking it might be good sauteed with peppers and served over penne.

Started as Soup Kitchen

Established as a food pantry in a St. Paul Street rowhouse in 1966 by the Midtown Churches Community Association, Manna House evolved into a soup kitchen, providing a meal a day to homeless, low-income and food-insecure Baltimoreans. The nonprofit moved to its present space on 25th Street in 1989.

Over the years, it expanded the services it offered, including transitional housing and counseling. Generous donors made possible a larger dining room, a room for men’s and women’s clothing, a meeting room, hospitality room, a laundry room and showers for guests.

Adults without a home can get their mail delivered to Manna House. The able-bodied can get help finding work.

And, as always, they can get a morning meal, at least five days a week.

“We’d like to reopen on weekends,” says executive director Antonio “Tony” Coffield. “But securing funding, staffing and volunteers is a huge hurdle for us currently.”

An extensive remodeling that ended last year gave Manna House a modern kitchen with what Ajayi calls the “Rolls Royce of ovens” that can cook three ways at once. There’s a walk-in freezer and refrigerator, and an ample storage area. Volunteers from churches and colleges help Ajayi prepare some of the dishes he serves.

Beef Tongue, Black Rice

Every Monday, he assesses the ingredients he has on hand and what’s expected to arrive. He likes to cook two meals ahead of schedule. “That way,” he says, “if there are any unforeseen circumstances, we have backups.”

Ajayi is a true believer in using surplus food. So, in addition to the regular local donors, he’s plugged into Copia, a New York-based “technology enabled surplus recovery” company that works with major food retailers to distribute their unsold products to thousands of nonprofits.

He explained how it works while cubing potatoes:

“I’ll get text messages from them saying ‘Hey, you got a delivery coming from Cheesecake Factory, it’ll be here,’ and then they give a roundabout time.”

Deliveries from Cheesecake Factory often include bread, sometimes frozen soup. “The soup I can defrost and serve as soup,” he says. “But sometimes I have to repurpose it into something else, like a sauce.”

Sometimes repurposing food happens on a larger scale – thus, the brisket from Canada, thus, the big food delivery when Gopuff, the food delivery company, trimmed its workforce and closed more than 70 warehouses, including one in Maryland. That resulted in multiple deliveries of food to Manna House.

Since the pandemic, some surplus food donations have arrived from ghost kitchens, the virtual restaurants that prepare meals for delivery.

And there are, now and then, donations that really challenge the Manna House chef – a load of beef tongue, for instance, or black ramen noodles and black rice.

While Ajayi contemplates how to use those ingredients, and whether his guests will appreciate them, he goes with what he’s got: Barbecued chicken on Thursday, beef and noodles on Friday.

After that, it’s whatever he can conjure in his kitchen, each meal keeping faith with Manna House’s long, good mission.