Wine, Women & Shoes: CRAFTkitchen Serves up Tasty Plates for a Great Cause

When we opened CRAFTkitchen, one of our main goals was to find ways to use our culinary skills to support our community and promote great causes right here at home. We’re so excited to announce, then, that we’re an official culinary partner of Wine Women and Shoes, an annual findraising event benefitting St. Jude’s Ranch for Children.

St. Jude’s Ranch works to transform the lives of abused children by providing them safe housing, nurturing care and therapeutic guidance at a beautiful 40-acre campus in Boulder City. The Ranch currently houses around 35 children and provides programs and services to many more across our state. “House Parents” and dedicated, trained professionals provide children at the Ranch (ranging from newborns to 18-year-olds) everything from individualized therapeutic treatment, to healthy family dinners each evening, to social guidance that helps young adults transition to living on their own as self-sufficient, civic-minded citizens.

As part of its Residential Foster Care Program, the Ranch houses six children in each of its homes on campus—and each unit functions just like a traditional family, offering children stability and opportunities they’ve often never before had. Children in the program go to public school, participate in sports and after-school activities, work on homework with the House Parents and have dinner together as a family every evening. One of the distinct components of this program—and something that really encouraged us to get involved with St. Jude’s Ranch for Children—is the Ranch’s ability to preserve sibling relationships. Under its Residential Foster Care Program, siblings see each other daily, play together, go to school together and get to live alongside one another at the gorgeous campus.

St. Jude’s Ranch for Children also offers a number of other programs (like its Transitional Living Program for young adults and its Pregnant and Parenting Teen Program), and each one takes such care to provide its participants with effective guidance and support, tailored to their individual needs and skillsets. Needless to say, becoming involved with this cause was an absolute no-brainer for our team--and we’re counting down the hours until we get to give a little back at Wine Women & Shoes to the people who’ve dedicated their lives to helping our community’s most vulnerable children.

Wine, Women and Shoes takes place Sunday, April 30 from 1-5 p.m. at 7770 Dean Martin Drive in Las Vegas. The event will include wine and food tastings, a fashion show, luxury cars on display, designer boutique shopping, a silent auction and celebrity meet-and-greets. You can purchase general admission and VIP tickets online.

You’ll find us there at our CRAFTkitchen booth, serving up our Citrus, Lump Crab & Avocado Salad as well as our Heirloom Beet, Ricotta Salata, Crushed Pistachio Salad—and we’d love to see you there in support of this great cause. We also want to extend a special thank you to Michelle Howard and our local friends at Flora Couture for co-sponsoring the display at our booth.

If you can’t make it to the event, but want to get involved with St. Jude’s Ranch, you can learn more about donating to the Ranch here. The Ranch is open to the public and offers a really great thrift store for visitors. We definitely recommend taking a tour of St. Jude’s Ranch next time you’re in Boulder City—you’ll be blown away by both the sheer beauty of the property and the energy and spirit of everyone you meet there.

We hope to see you this Sunday, Henderson and Las Vegas. Come out and celebrate with us in the name of this unbelievable cause!

CRAFT GOES PINK FOR BREAST CANCER AWARENESS MONTH

As National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, October is a month that’s very special to our team here at CRAFT. CRAFT’s Founder and Head Chef Jaret Blinn lost his mother to her battle with cancer years ago. As a result, during his time as Red Rock Resort’s executive pastry chef, Chef Jaret created and developed “Project Pink,” a Station Casinos effort that donated proceeds from pastry sales to the Southern Nevada affiliate of Susan G. Komen® . The effort was so effective and well received that Station Casinos expanded Chef Jaret’s idea to several areas throughout all of its properties and brought “Project Pink” back year after year as a recurring annual effort.

Chef Jaret is now continuing the tradition he started at Red Rock over six years ago with the first-ever CRAFTgoesPINK effort. Throughout the entire month of October, our pastry case will feature house-made pink pastries, proceeds from the sales of which will be donated to the local Susan G. Komen® chapter. (We’re also encouraging guests to post pictures of their pink pastries using #CRAFTgoesPINK to help raise awareness.)

As a family of chefs, our number one focus and concern has always been on two things: family and community, and there’s no better way to honor Chef Jaret’s mother and strengthen our community than by giving back in the best way we know how—through the power of our pastry case. We’re so excited to CRAFT up some delicious specialty pink pastries for you this month, Las Vegas, and we hope you’ll join us in our collective fight against breast cancer.

If you’d like to pre-order pink pastries, please call us at (702) 728-5828 or email info@CRAFTkitchenlv.com. You can also donate directly to the local Susan G. Komen® chapter here.

THANK YOU FOR PARTICIPATING IN RESTAURANT WEEK!

As a locally owned cafe bakery, there’s nothing we love more than being able to support local causes. One of our favorite local nonprofits is an organization called Three Square, an organization that delivers wholesome food to community members in need in its pursuit of a hunger-free Southern Nevada. (How cool is that?)

Every year, Three Square hosts Las Vegas Restaurant Week, a week in which participating local restaurants, eateries and bakeries agree to donate a certain amount of proceeds from their sales to Three Square’s fight to end hunger in our community. (We wrote all about Restaurant Week in an earlier blog post, if you want to learn more.)

Since we opened our doors in 2015, this was our first year participating–and we couldn’t have been happier to be a part of such a great cause. We asked you all to help us out by purchasing pastries from our pastry case during Restaurant Week. For each pastry sold, we agreed to donate $1 to Three Square. Well, the results are in and, thanks to your generous participation, we were able to donate more than 900 meals to those in need.

So, we just wanted to take a minute to say thank you SO much for helping us contribute to this incredible organization. Your participation is responsible for feeding so many hungry mouths in our community, and you should be proud. We can’t wait to see what your generosity does for Restaurant Week 2017!