Food Service

Hey, anyone want an update on what I'm doing? Yeah, I know it's been a long time, but what can I say, I've been busy.

Anyway, I'm just now starting the third week of my food service rotation. The big project is to design a new menu that is appropriate for both serving in the cafeteria and for patient room service. To do it right, we're supposed to meet specific nutritional goals and cost requirements and then actually implement it from start to finish (from forecasting, to recipe design, to ordering, to receiving, to training the cooks, to doing some of the cooking, etc. etc. etc.) Way back during orientation, the preceptor for the rotation said that she's changing it so that we're supposed to start working on the project 4-6 weeks prior to starting (this was 4 days prior to when I started the rotation). The expectation would be that you present the proposed menu changes on day 1 and go from there. I got a special pass due to the shortened time frame... I got to present on day 2! Good times.

So anyway, I spent most of that weekend working on the project. Our menu is supposed to have a unifying theme and I chose to go with an autumn menu using local foods. I called it New England Harvest and actually recycled much of a menu from I had to design with others in a class at school. (luckily we designed an autumn menu that time). So then I got into the rotation and showed it to the preceptor. Now a little background is that we're only required to implement a single item and we have 5 weeks to do it. Well, I chose to do all my items and to do it all in less than 2 weeks! (yes, I know I'm crazy, but whatever). But actually it was a lot of fun. I did manage to get in a lot of local foods. Here's the menu:

Carrot and Ginger Soup
Spinach and Pear Salad (with toasted pecans, gorgonzola cheese, and dried cranberries)
Roasted vegetables (delicata squash, butternut squash, fennel, red onions, sweet potatoes, Macomber turnips)
Quinoa (with mixed in shallots and carrots)
Lemon-Thyme Chicken
Apple Crisp

(Hey if Carol is reading does any of that sound familiar :)

The local foods were bosc pears (which were roasted), cranberries, delicata squash, butternut squash (though without knowing exactly the farm because of how they were processed to peel them), macomber turnips, and cortland apples in the crisp.

Anyway, long story short it all came together with surprisingly few problems. The soup proved difficult to scale to make 10 gallons - largely because the kitchen doesn't have a burr mixer to make large amounts of pureed soups (so I had to steam the carrots first, puree them, then add to the soup), and every dish had something that could have been better on the day of serving (most notably that the quinoa was undercooked and a bit crunchy). But from the customers perspective it all turned out great. I'm actually hopeful that some of these items will make it on to the normal food rotation. They would certainly drop the local foods just because it adds complexity to the ordering, but it was nice to see that it really wasn't that much more expensive to use.

So now that the project is done, I don't know what I'll do for the next 3 weeks. For starters I get a field trip tomorrow... I'm going to tour one of Ocean Spray's cranberry bogs. Super cool!