Last week I took a fun adventure to Des Moines, Iowa to hold a Shabbat dinner for work. We held a Friday night Shabbat dinner in Des Moines for young adult campaign professionals, volunteers and journalists working to "set the table" for the 2016 elections leading up to the Iowa Caucus. My colleague had the idea a few months ago to hold a Shabbat dinner in Iowa and we decided to follow through and make it happen.
I lived in Chicago for about eight years when I was younger but never made it to Iowa. I was glad to explore a new US state through work. We landed in Des Moines and went to the hotel before deciding where to eat. We knew we wanted to eat barbecue so after asking the hotel where the best barbecue in Des Moines was located, we headed to Jethro's Barbecue. There are apparently a bunch of other delicious barbecue places but this is where we ended up going. Jethro's is close to Drake University and has awesome barbecue. Full disclosure - I do not eat pork so I can only judge the chicken and beef barbecue options. We ordered fried cheese squares to start (basically mozzarella sticks in square format) and I ordered a platter that came with pulled chicken, brisket, cornbread, mac and cheese and applesauce. It was delicious and so much food - I could not finish everything that was on my plate.
That night, we held our Shabbat dinner at the World Food Prize building in downtown Des Moines and brought together over 55 young adult campaign professionals, volunteers, journalists and local community leaders for an awesome Friday night dinner in partnership with one of our grantee organizations, OneTable. You can read more about the dinner we hosted here. I am so excited we had a chance to hold a dinner for those working hard to set the tables for the 2016 elections and loved being able to explore Iowa a bit myself. One of the ideas we floated around at the dinner was creating a field of dreams Shabbat dinner over the summer among the cornfields of Iowa, hopefully we will support some of the attendees to make it happen!
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