Week 3

Another week has come and gone, but this week I accomplished a lifelong dream – going to Hogwarts! Just kidding, I went to the OU equivalent of Hogwarts, the Residential Colleges.  Monday and Tuesday I spent working with Chase and Doug, learning about how the res colleges food service production works.  They offer more personal food options, mainly cook to order meals.  This differs from other locations because their menu never really changes, so what they order is similar week to week.  Also, due to its smaller size and exclusivity to the students that live in the residential colleges, you get more one-on-one time with the students and studying their eating patterns.  For example, breakfast and lunch are pretty scarce because the students are running around campus for class, whereas dinner, when everyone finally comes home, is packed.  Learning these patterns and preparing for them, makes the operation run so much smoother; if you know that dinner is your busiest time, you can tailor your staffing needs to fit or do extra prep in the morning so you don’t fall behind.  It was fun to learn about a whole different side of food service, more like a restaurant than a traditional dining hall.  Plus, you can’t beat spending a couple days in basically a castle! 

Try to tell me this isn't Hogwarts

The pizza/pasta area 

The custom salad area

Wednesday they let me loose in the kitchen to start recipe development.  For the upcoming staff week, we are going to be having an allergy awareness booth, where we will be having some allergy friendly, gluten free, and vegan samples for passersby to try out.  I wanted to make Mexican themed samples because tacos are a staple in my own diet, and just because you have restrictions doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy some tacos.  So, we tested out a recipe that uses chickpeas or white beans as the base of the tacos with an array of colorful toppings.  Recipe development crucial, especially for me, the untalented cook, because there are so many unknowns in a recipe that you might not catch until you actually try it out.  We will be testing more next week, but it’s looking very promising.

Thursday I had a later start because I assisted catering with a President’s dinner.  Boy does preparing a meal for hundreds of people take a lot of work! Overall, no one ended up with their meal in their lap and there were only a few hiccups along the way.  Working catering, you definitely have to have a cool head and outstanding problem solving skills because generally, anything that can go wrong, will go wrong and in that moment you need to come up with a solution.  OU’s catering team are excellent at what they do and I think they put on a very good event.  Based on the clean plates we got back, the attendees must have thought so too.

The partial dining set up (there was a whole other room) and podium for speeches

Friday was another exciting day, as we helped with the Big Event prep.  The Big Event is basically a University wide day of service to give back to the community.  Lunch is provided to volunteers, so we assembled over 3,000 boxed lunches to go out to the various job sites.  How incredible that 3,000 people are willing to spend their Saturday volunteering!

The sandwich take over! Luckily, we had lots of student help and finished in record time. 

Next week is the start of our many events and booths the happen at the end of the school year.  Be sure to keep an eye out for us around campus and stop by to learn about our sustainability efforts (and maybe a free sample)!