It is now the third week of the internship, here at the University of Missouri - Columbia. There are two NACUFS interns here, myself, and Sara. I am from New Jersey and attend Rutgers University. Sara is from Pennsylvania and attends Boston University.
The first week there was a very warm welcoming from the department. Everyone here is extremely nice and knows we are the 'NACUFS interns.' We started the first week with a lot of meetings - it was great to get to know all the people involved in campus dining one-on-one and be able to ask questions. We did a campus scavenger hunt to get to know the campus grounds better. I am awed by how big and beautiful the campus is! The Rec center has three floors, and they are currently undergoing renovations on multiple buildings. One of the buildings that is being renovated is Sabai. Sabai is one of the new dining halls that will feature South Asian Cuisine. They are also closing the Mark Twain Market (an all-you-care-to-eat facility) for renovations. But currently they have it open to service the scholars program, which are students in high school.
Our first time in the kitchen, I worked at Rollins and Sara worked at Plaza 900. We both worked in the dish room. Which I thought was not as bad as everyone makes it out to be. I learned all about the dishwasher, where everything belongs in the kitchen, about the pulper, ect. After two days in the dishroom we both worked with the stock clerk at our respective locations. It was nice to see the shipments come in and the role of the receiver. After receiving, we each worked in production at our separate locations as well. Here they use CBORD as their computer program. In production I learned about how the forecast their food and plan for the next day. I was also about to observe how the staff communicates between each other. For example, the counter workers would continually communicate with the cooks to tell them if more of a specific food needed to be made before it ran out. Everyone at Rollins is extremely nice and took the time to explain any questions I had about the kitchen - since there were equipment there that I have never used before. But the big new thing for me was weighing everything. All the dishes were weighed during preparation, before it went out on the line, and after the meal hour was over. In production I also learned how they utilize the POs (Pan overs) which are also left-overs.
Here they have one executive chef and many sous chefs (mainly 1 or 2 at each dining hall). Even though each dining hall competes for numbers, they are one big family - and it is great to see how they work all together.
This week Sara and I are starting to work at the same facility together. We worked at Catalyst Cafe, and will work at J cafe tomorrow.
The projects that we were assigned for the summer include a mini-special event (each of us creates one) and two major events. My mini-special event theme is Medieval Times, while Sara's theme is Mangoes. Basically the mini-special event is a little change at one of the stations and they will still be serving the same food at the other stations. For the two major events, one is when all the stations will be changed in the one dining hall, and the other event we are creating is for a campus wide event - like Thanksgiving. We will not be implementing our two major events, but will only be creating the business plan for them. While, we will be executing our two mini-special events. I am still in the process of finalizing the menu for my event. We pick one or two recipes that we want to test. Mine is Frumente, which is a wheat dish they served in the medieval time period. Sara tested a banana-mango spring roll, tandori style chicken on mango rice, and a chopped mango jicama salad. We tested today in Plaza 900's kitchen. Out dishes came out great and we were able to serve them on the line during dinner! While we tested the recipes we had to record everything we did, and weigh the raw products as well as the final product to write in our recipe. We also had to calculate serving sizes - which we will need for the nutrient analysis of our recipes. Below is a picture of Sara and her Banana-Mango Spring Rolls with Chocolate Ganache.
Sara and I are having a great time here! I am learning so much and am having such a great experience!
PS- for the future NACUFS interns, I am going to try to post as often as I can, so you guys have a better idea of our day to day activities. .
No comments:
Post a Comment