At Oregon Coast Culinary Institute, executive director Shawn Hanlin is used to giving the tests, not getting them.

But this task, handed to him by the good folks putting together Hunger Awareness Week, really tested his creativity.

The test: Take a typical food box handed out a local food pantry and create three outstanding menus using just the items available in the box.

“It was a little bit challenging at first,” Hanlin said.

“Then I started thinking about what goes together and what would make a good family meal,” he said. “Then the menus just came together.”

Chef Hanlin created three full meals to include a starter course, a main course and a dessert. One of the menus is featured above. It includes a spinach and cottage cheese pie as the starter, a kidney bean, lentil and tofu stir fry as the main course and an orange and apricot cake with corn flake streusel as dessert.

The other two menus, which will all be handed out with food boxes this month, can be found on the Web site for Oregon Coast Community Action: http://www.orcca.us.

“We’ll provide all these recipes to our clients so they can make healthy meals,” Hallie Winchell of Community Action said.

The hardest part may have been coming up with the main dishes.

“There was only one piece of meat in the box, the pork, so we used that in carnitas,” Hanlin said. “(The stir fry) is basically a meat dish with everything but the meat. It’s a complete meal.”

As he made the stir fry on Friday, Hanlin said that finishing the meal is very quick. The lentils need to be cooked ahead of time, and everything else takes about five minutes to get everything hot.

“Be careful not to break the tofu,” he said as he gently turned the tofu in the wok with a large curved spatula. “It just has to get warmed through.”

“We wrote out three, three-course meals,” Hanlin said. “And there was a lot of stuff left over.”