GIG HARBOR, Wash. — In the picturesque city of Gig Harbor, there's one meal that has everyone talking: Michelle Brenner's homemade lasagna.
“This is by no means a diet lasagna,” she says. “I tell people do not get on the scale the next day.”
This is the real thing. Using all homemade ingredients, Brenner spends hours every day baking in her kitchen. She then freezes all of that lasagna in six-to-eight pound servings and leaves it outside her brightly decorated home.
“There is no charge to pick up a lasagna,” she says. “If somebody wants something or needs something there's no charge.”
Brenner says she got the idea at the supermarket.
“ I was actually doing some shopping for some local residents,” she says, “and in doing so I happen to see a lot of frozen lasagnas being purchased and it really broke my heart because I'm very Italian and it was hard to see that.”
So Michelle Brenner let everyone on a Gig Harbor Facebook page know she's willing to bake them lasagna. In the first two weeks she made 400 dishes.
“And what one little offer turned into was a community wanting to reach out and feed each other,” she says.
Most of the people picking up lasagna wanted to pay it forward so Brenner started up a fund beginning with the $1000 she got as a stimulus check.
“To date I believe we have raised a little over $5000,” she says.
People have left Brenner donations, thank you cards, balloons, flowers and wine. Someone even made her a t-shirt that says “Lasagna Lady”.
Her lasagnas are getting dropped off all over, from police stations to fire departments to healthcare workers as far away as Edmonds.
“My goal is 1000 so I'm hoping we can hit 1000 lasagnas,” she says.
It's the simple things that seem to make the biggest difference. Just ask the Lasagna Lady.
“No matter where we come from or what we have or what we don't have, we are all here together,” she says. “And one lasagna at a time, we are going to get through this and we are going to make that difference.”
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