25 years of holiday cooking, giving back in Santa Rosa

One table of volunteers trimmed bitty carrots. Another group washed and peeled beets to later roast Tuesday at the Worth Our Weight Cafe in east Santa Rosa. The vegetables were part of the wholesome meals to be delivered, along with turkey, garlic mashed potatoes and other holiday favorites, to hundreds of needy families on Christmas Day.

Evelyn Cheatham, a well-known Sonoma County chef who runs the nonprofit Worth Our Weight apprenticeship program, started whipping up holiday meals back in 1989, inviting relatives and friends - and their friends - to help out with the charitable operation. Since the program started, Cheatham said they’ve prepared more than 12,000 meals, which have gone to anyone who asked, including to people who lived in their cars and those in homeless shelters.

But after a quarter-century overseeing what is now a cherished holiday program, Cheatham plans to end the countywide meals after the deliveries on Thursday. She will continue to cook for some shelters.

“It’s the number that got me - number 25,” Cheatham, 61, said of the years she’s been running the effort, which started at 75 meals on Christmas Day and boomed to more than 500. “We’ve done it lovingly and cheerfully,” Cheatham said.

Cheatham and her corps of volunteers, from 40 to as many as 70 people a day, have managed to deliver the meals each year by early afternoon on Christmas.

Fundraising was a challenge in recent years, with Cheatham leaning heavily on friends and not businesses - a demonstration of what can be done by individuals who come together. Cheatham said she always had faith the meals would come together, but it was a “bit stressful” having to repeatedly ask friends for ingredients.

“It’s time. Twenty-five years is a good time to end on a high note,” said Marcy Smothers, who sits on the Worth Our Weight board.

She added, “Evelyn has put her heart and soul into this.”

Cheatham will still have a lot on her plate in the coming year as Worth Our Weight plans to expand its apprenticeship program, which provides free culinary and food-service training for 16- to 24-year-olds who’ve been homeless, in foster care, or faced other challenges. Smothers said the operation has “ambitious” plans, including the possibility of opening a cold-pressed juice bar.

Still, Cheatham is not ready to put all the pots and pans away.

She said she wants to invite friends over to cook meals at Christmas time for the local shelters, such as the Catholic Charities’ Family Support Center, where she’s been delivering holiday feasts for years.

“Secretly, I’m never going to stop doing this,” she said about cooking, while taking a short coffee break at the Worth Our Weight Cafe on Hahman Drive, just south of Montgomery Village Shopping Center.

Smothers has seen the evolution of the program and the energy that was put into it every year.

“It used to be cooking with friends, and it grew into cooking with the entire community,” she said. “People from all walks of life, with little time, managed to come together.”

That’s what Cheatham envisioned when she first started serving up the free holiday meals.

She wanted to replicate the holidays from her childhood, when her aunts and mother would cram into the kitchen, telling jokes as they cooked up a lavish meal. She said her grandfather never denied her second servings of cake or sweets during the holidays. She wanted that for children in Sonoma County.

“This country is so wealthy, we should not have hungry people,” she said. “Especially this day, nobody should have to tell their kids they can’t have seconds.”

Cheatham has been a big player in the Sonoma County food scene since the late 1980s.

She worked at the Downtown Bakery and Creamery in Healdsburg and other upscale restaurants before opening in the 1990s her own Santa Rosa cafe, Tweets, but it closed four years later. The San Francisco native later launched the Worth Our Weight culinary program in 2006.

The bountiful meals she’s serving this Christmas each include a turkey, ham, roast yams, coleslaw, vegetables, stuffing and various desserts.

Ramona Allen, a baking and pastry chef at Worth Our Weight, said prepping those meals had become part of her family’s holiday tradition for the past three years.

“It’s a truly magical experience,” said Allen, who first learned about the holiday meals when she was a student in one of Cheatham’s classes at Santa Rosa Junior College.

“It’s amazing to see a community come together and create something so meaningful for people,” Allen added. “The right stuff comes through the door at the right moment.”

Andrew McMahon, 18, an apprentice at Worth Our Weight, spent Tuesday morning peeling beets to drizzle with oil and roast. It was the second holiday meal he’s helped prepare.

“It’s really fun. You get to know people. You get to chitchat,” McMahon said. He said he’s enjoyed the heart-warming stories the drivers bring back after dropping off the meals.

Standing a few feet away in the cafe entrance, Marni Fechter took donations and checked in volunteers as they trickled in. She traveled from New York City to help out Cheatham, whom she previously worked with at a restaurant in the Catskill Mountains.

Even while on the East Coast, Fechter, an author and former party planner, said Cheatham would travel back to Sonoma County to put together the holiday meals.

“We’d think she was coming to hang out with family,” she said, adding that she and another co-worker, who now lives in Mexico City and flew in to help this holiday, decided to join her as soon as they found out why she was traveling to Santa Rosa for Christmas.

“She never missed a year no matter where she was,” Fechter said.

For the past seven or eight years, Fechter has helped assemble the meals, which include a turkey wrapped in foil and decorative ribbon.

Fechter said Cheatham dedicates much of her time to the youth program and needed to “scale back” on the holiday meals. However, she voiced hope that someone else would continue offering the service communitywide.

“She’s a great reminder that everyone has something to offer and share,” Fechter said. “Hopefully, it can inspire someone else in picking it up.”

You can reach Staff Writer ?Eloísa Ruano González at 521-5458 or eloisa.gonzalez@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @eloisanews.