Group lunches have restarted three days a week at the Boulder-Basin Senior Center after a staff shortage last winter mostly stalled the program, and Meals on Wheels deliveries for homebound seniors have also restarted three days a week in Boulder.
Since April 13, Helena-based chef Josh Manning has been preparing and serving fresh-cooked meals at the Boulder-Basin Senior Center at 201 S. Main St. in Boulder from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday each week. The program is operated by the Rocky Mountain Development Council, a primarily federally funded organization known regionally as “the Rocky” or RMDC. Manning has also been delivering fresh-cooked meals to homebound seniors via the Rocky’s Meals on Wheels program each of the three days he travels to Boulder, according to Mindy Diehl, the Rocky’s senior nutrition and transportation director. Seniors in the program can request frozen meals for Friday through Monday, which Manning delivers on Thursday, allowing the program to provide a meal for each day of the week.
Group lunches at the Senior Center were scheduled to begin on April 12, a Tuesday, but a spring blizzard prevented Manning from reaching Boulder that day. RMDC Community Outreach Coordinator Kara Nelson said that the first three weeks of group lunches are a “soft opening” before a “grand reopening” on Tuesday, May 3. The official reopening that day features a “really delicious menu,” Diehl said, including chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes and gravy with purple beets, golden pears, and rolls, plus what Nelson described as an “extra special cake.”
