OTISFIELD — Two days before Christmas, Debbie Dyer started her day baking loaves of bread for the monthly food pantry at the East Otisfield Baptist Church. At the same time, she cooked up a pot of Italian vegetable soup, a family recipe.

Dyer said the soup was made with ingredients available at the pantry, and she included a recipe for people to make it at home.

It’s a personal touch at the small food pantry, which Dyer said gets about seven families a month on average, with more in the winter months. In addition to the home-cooked food, Otisfield residents in need have access to garden vegetables such as squash provided by local community members.

Dyer, the clerk at the church, said members started the food pantry to help out Spurr’s Corner Church, which for years has been giving out food from 10 a.m. to noon on the first and third Tuesday of each month.

“It seemed to me that we didn’t need to leave all that work to one church,” Dyer said.

The pantry at the Baptist church is open Fridays from 1 to 5 p.m., which Dyer said was set to help people who might work mornings and can’t make it to the Spurr’s Corner pantry.

She said the churches sometimes share food and try to help Otisfield residents as much as they can.

Priscilla Delehanty, music director for the East Otisfield Baptist Church, said it’s important to help people living in hard times. “Any one of us could be there,” she said. “It doesn’t take long.”

In addition to canned food, pasta and frozen meat, the pantry carries toilet paper, paper towels, dish soap and other items people can’t buy with food stamps.

The pantry is open to anyone from Otisfield. Dyer said she doesn’t require a general assistance slip, but trusts that people who come in are in need.

When the pantry receives money, Dyer said, she buys gift cards for diapers. The fresh bread came when a friend brought a 100-pound bag of flour from a closed pizza restaurant to the pantry.

She said few people took flour, but the bread has been more popular.

The people who come in for food are gracious as well. On Friday, Dyer said a woman declined taking more food home. “’I’ll leave some for someone else,’” Dyer recalled her saying.

Dyer said members of the church and others in the community have been generous to both food pantries.

“If I said the pantry was empty on a Sunday, it would be full by Monday,” she said.

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