Page 44 - South Mississippi Living - December, 2016

DINING serving up smiles
of their large kitchen and share an intense passion for cooking for the hungry. Jimmy Peterson is the chef and Tony Henderson, who his friends call “Angel,” is the sous chef.
Cooking under these conditions is not an easy task; the foods that are donated vary, but the number of hungry that line up every day does not. Feed My Sheep feeds about 500 people a day in their Gulfport kitchen and their home delivery service.
But Chef Peterson says that’s not a problem. “All you have got to do is tell me what to cook and I’ll get it done,” he said.
He has been cooking on the Coast for 30 years in places such as Barnhill’s and Flying J, but he got his start at home where his mother taught him the basics. He says he takes pride in what he does and once he got a job cooking, he fell in love with it right away.
Peterson has cooked at Feed My sheep for almost eight years and people rave about his specialties.
He prepares most of the entrees and as we talked about what he likes to cook best, other kitchen members chimed in. “His jambalaya is to die for,” someone said and Chef Peterson laughed. He says he can make a good jambalaya out of hot dogs, sausage, ham or any other meat he can get
his hands on. Other dishes that people talked about were his beans (“I can cook any bean,” he told me with pride.), shepherd’s pie, all the vegetables, and an especially good gravy.
Sous chef Henderson has cooked
for more than 40 years and got his start at Moody’s in Gulfport, but
also worked at the Broadwater and the Biloxi Hilton. Chef Henderson is animated when he talks about cooking and explains that he is responsible
for making the soups and vegetables, but he is especially proud of his holiday cooking. He goes on at some
length about his “Old time Southern cornbread dressing,” but he wouldn’t give me the recipe. For Thanksgiving and Christmas, he makes 23 pans
of dressing for the Harrison County Sheriff’s feed-the-needy program and another 20 pans for Feed My Sheep.
Henderson is also proud of his four greens in one pot dish, cornbread, and candy yams. He adds, “The most important ingredient is love.”
The shelter feeds as many as eight to 900 people for the holiday meals, but everyone I talked to wanted to make sure I mentioned that there are 10 other months in the year when people are just as hungry. Lots of people
and organizations make donations in November and December, but some of the other months can be lean.
44 SOUTH MISSISSIPPI Living • December 2016
FOR MORE REFLECTIONS OF THE GULF COAST >> www.smliving.net
Jill Leggett spent 25 years in the Air Force and she still wears the mantle of command and responsibility proudly. When she retired from the service,
she got involved in a church program that fed seniors. It started with just 12 people and when she left, it was feeding 125 people daily. Somebody was doing something right.
Later she got involved with The Lord is My Help in Ocean Springs. She arrives at work by 5 a.m. and has been doing so for four years. This