Grade 8 Extravaganza!

Our loyal team of interns here at Penn State spent the past two days divided between different dining commons to work with the grade 8 chefs in the kitchens. For Angela and I, this meant waking up at 4:30am and hiking up the hill to the Findlay dining commons to prepare food for the 2,800 guests competing in the Special Olympics. 

Day 1 began with mindless help in the kitchen and quickly turned into the two of us each holding spatulas and frantically scrambling gallons of eggs over the huge hot stove. We learned a valuable lesson that day, that without years and years of experience, these tasks are certainly not as easy as the cooks make them appear to be. From there, they managed to keep us quite busy with multiple tasks ranging from slicing lunch meats to preparing the Celiac trays of food and hand delivering them to our guests. 

By day 2, the cooks felt confident enough to leave us alone with multiple batches of pancake batter and 4 huge grills. 3 ½ hours and thousands of pancakes later, we both agreed that we would not be in need of an arm workout anytime in the near future.Who would have known PSU’s dining facilities could be so accommodating? All in all, we both had a fantastic experience meeting all of the cooks and becoming more familiar with the operations of a dining hall kitchen.