My week at GSU Eagle Dining

Monday I arrived at Eagle Dining Commons. I was there with two other interns, Suma and Nnemoa. We got into Brittany’s office and went over our tasks for the week and learned about what her job as Nutritional Coordinator is. We then took a tour around the new Landrum. I was so impressed. It is so nice. She explained the different stations to us. Her “baby” is the No Whey! Station. That station is free of the top 8 food allergens: soy, peanuts, egg, milk, fish, shellfish, wheat, and treenuts. We ended up eating lunch at the Dining Commons just to see what it was all about and what was offered and check out the different stations. Once lunch was over, we came back to find recipes for two days at No Whey! These recipes will be implemented next semester. For day one, we came up with: Italian Roasted Chicken, Vegetable Lasagna, Spinach Artichoke Mashed Potatoes, Black Bean, Avocado Pepper and Corn Salad with Lime and Cilantro, Purple Cabbage and Apple Slaw, Black Bean Brownies. For day two we came up with: Rosemary Ranch Chicken Kebabs with Bell Pepper, Sweet Potato and Black Bean Enchilada with Guacamole, Roasted Asparagus Drizzled with Olive Oil and Balsamic Vinegar, Quinoa Salad with Grilled Scallions, Favas, and Dates, Carrot and Beet Salad, Pumpkin Bread with Apple Cider Icing. We just came up with the menus, not the recipes, but they were all amended to be allergen free. After finding recipes, we discussed management functions and how Eagle Dining is run.

The “new” Landrum (the main Dining Commons)

On Tuesday we worked on standardizing recipes for the No Whey! Menu. We had to standardize them for 25 and 50 people. While most recipes are made for 400-800, this one is less because not as many people need the allergen free station. Then we went on a tour of the other dining commons on campus, Lakeside, to see the kitchen and facility. Then we had to sit in on an employee training that every new GSU Eagle Dining Services employee has to go through. It was basic food safety stuff and how the pay schedule works. It was the way to see how HR stuff work here. We then got to go to a US Foods show on campus, which was cool. It was for restaurants on campus and in the community to go to. Different vendors for US Foods came to this food show to showcase what they had. There was lots of meats, desserts, drinks and everything!

A sample of a standardized recipe ^

The US Foods show ^

On Wednesday we went to Lakeside to help set up for the Thanksgiving lunch. Our part was to help set up the dessert area. We set up tablecloths to go under the dessert display. Then we had to help get the cakes and cookies ready to go. We had to plate pumpkin cheesecake, sweet potato pie, carrot cake, and red velvet cake. In addition we had set up the chocolate chip cookies and oatmeal raisin cookies. After we set up and watch all of the people come in, we left it to the employees. We had a talk in the afternoon with the lady who does the purchasing orders so we could learn how purchasing, bids, and contracts work. It’s pretty crazy how they can make it all happen.

^ Thanksgiving lunch and Lakeside

On Thursday, we worked on some more standardization of Holiday Dinner recipes. We also toured the distribution facility to see how it works.

Friday was the day where we got to test some of our recipes for the No Whey! Station. We ended up making the black bean brownies, the sweet potato and black bean enchiladas, and the quinoa salad. I didn’t really try the enchiladas, because I don’t like spicy foods, but the quinoa salad was amazing! The black bean brownies were still good, but they turned out different than when I made them at home. After spending the morning in the test kitchen, we went over financials with the director so we could understand how it all works.

Making our recipes

Brittany and me!

Week at Burke County Schools with Donna Martin!

On Monday, I arrived for my first day at the Burke County Board of Education. I was so excited to work with Donna Martin this week, who is the director and very well known in school nutrition. She’s even done work with the First Lady of the US, which is super cool! My first task was to come up with a few fun facts for a PowerPoint that will be running on a TV in the high school cafeteria, which will also include the menu for the week. Some kids at the high school said part of their reason for not eating school lunch was that they didn’t know what was on the menu, so this scrolling PowerPoint was made to help that issue.

Me with Donna Martin

Another task I had was dealing with the new regulations called Smart Snacks. I went through and analyzed some of the ice creams, chips, and other snacks for one of the schools. After lunch I went with Brianna, who works under Donna Martin, to some of the schools to take more photos of pictures. I then analyzed those foods in the Smart Snacks calculator to see if they were compliant.

Looking at the school snack order form to get the nutrition facts to plug into the Smart Snacks calculator.

Tuesday I spent the day doing a review in one of the schools. After doing the review I worked on the packaging line with peaches to be used for the next day. I’m glad I was able to do a review. It’s basically what would be done if the state came in. Donna has made up an entire inspection list that is very similar to what the state would use. She walked me around the dry storage area, the freezer, the cooler, and the kitchen to show me how to conduct an inspection. After doing that part, I sat down with Donna to go through the production records for that school. We went through the breakfast, where they have to write down the items, how many they send down to the classroom, and then how many they bring back and cost it all out. There we looked to just make sure there were no errors and it looked good. Then I got to look at the lunch production record. This is where they write down the foods on their menu and then list the amount of food used under the meal component that it is. My job was to go through all of the days of the school year so far and make sure that foods were listed under the proper component. So, for example, for some reason the manager thought that raisins were a meat product (Don’t understand?), so I had to make a note for her to change that and put it under the fruit section. Also, all fruits go in the “fruit” category, whereas vegetables have different categories such as “red/orange”, “starchy”, “beans, peas, and legumes”, etc.. She put all of her red/orange fruits in the red orange section and not in the fruit section, so I had to make a note for her to go back and fix it. So I was looking for little errors like that.

One of the cafeteria ladies “pulling” dough to make the biscuits.

The kitchen inspection list

The dry storage area, making sure everything was dated and properly stored.

My school lunch! And the cafeteria of this school. Lunch was great, I’m so impressed with what Donna Martin does. In addition I love the feel of the lunchroom.

After that, I got to work with the cool packaging machine to package peaches for the next day and for more of the schools. I got to work from both sides, the side where I was manually putting the trays in, and the other side where I was taking them off to put them on flats to be taken out to other schools. It’s cool how the machine works. There’s apparently so much to it but I didn’t get to experience the setup so I’m not entirely sure. But the pipes that the food goes down needs to be pressurized properly and pins have to be calibrated to drop the correct amount of food into the food tray. It’s really cool.

The first thing I did on Wednesday was doing another presentation with fun facts for a week of the menu. Following that, I worked more on Smart Snacks stuff for the schools and put the information into the individual schools of each folder. Then I went to middle school to talk to the kids during lunch. I was asking them about how they feel about school lunches and what they ate at home for dinner. I’m amazed at some of the stuff kids each for a meal at home. It’s sad.

Thursday I spent a lot of my day working with the packaging machine again, except this time it was using strawberries that were being packaged t be used for the Thanksgiving meal. Because the strawberries were taken out on Wednesday and weren’t taken out on Monday like they should have been, it caused extra time to be wasted. Frozen strawberries couldn’t be placed in the machine because when it rotates around it will cause the machine to get stuck. Because of this, we had to steam some of the strawberries (which caused them to lose some color) and combine them with the frozen strawberries to help thaw them out. That seemed to work but added extra labor. Before working with the machine, I was working on finding bids for different items (such as non-slip shoes and aluminum trays). When items don’t reach over a certain amount, informal bids can be done, which is just where you look up the cost for at least 3 places and purchase the cheapest option. After that, I worked did a little bit more with those PowerPoint menus for the high school, and Donna wanted a short clip of a YouTube video inserted into the menu. I got to learn how to do that, which was super exciting! Then Donna wanted me to write up an instruction sheet for it. I felt pretty accomplished.

Packaging strawberries.

On Friday, I got to go to Early Head Start in Burke County to work with Brianna. She explained about the program to me. I also go to listen in to her phone calls that were to local famers, managers, and the state for the State Health Benefit Plan. I then got to go a meeting with her that was at the middle school. They are working on something for the Fuel Up to Play 60 grant, so she was having a talk with the PE teachers and administration about what the next plans for that are. She has lots of cool parts to her job!

Overall it was a really good week and I learned a lot!

Week at Memorial University Medical Center kitchen

So this week I had a rotation in the kitchen at Memorial University Medical Center! I enjoyed it overall, minus the 1 hour commute (plus however much time for traffic) each way every day. That can really wear you out!

Me with my preceptors, Jeffery Quasha and Jessica Herbert.

I arrived at 8 on Monday and attended the daily morning meeting. They are having a big new patient menu rollout new week so there was lots of last minute stuff to be done before all of the new menus come out next week. After the meeting, Jessica took me on a tour of the hospital and told me about their different areas that they work with, including a coffee shop and a grab and go place within the hospital, the doctor lounge, as well as the main hospital cafeteria. After doing a tour, I helped with catering platters. In addition to doing all of the food for the hospital, the main chefs do catering for the hospital. This primarily occurs when administrators within the hospital have meetings. Sometimes the catering is more simple, with just a box lunch for 5, and other times it’s fancy and for a whole group of important people that could total 25 or 100. After working on catering I went to talk to patients with Jessica. It was pretty cool. We just went into the rooms on the floor that she was assigned to and asked patients what their experience with the food had been like since they had been there and if the service had been good. If that had any comments, they were noted. I just observed the first day of seeing patients.

This was a dessert tray for catering. I got to help with part of it.

These were the simple boxed lunches for another catering.

This week at Memorial was actually a record breaking catering week. So, all of Tuesday was spent working on different catering tasks. I got to help prep some of the food and went on some deliveries.

This was a catering for the hospital administrators done for 10 people. I didn’t help prepare any of the food but I got to go on the delivery. Jessica and I had to go back and get more dressing for the salads though, since the assistant we did the catering for didn’t think there was enough. She was very complimentary though. One thing I got to do that was interesting was go on a special patient visit. There was a patient who was on the pediatric floor and wouldn’t eat. His nurses said he was just down and kind of depressed and refused to eat the food. So, Jeffery asked me if I wanted to come do this visit. He said that when patients refuse to eat, they usually call in the chef to talk to the patient to see if there’s anything they want to eat. After talking with the patient, Jeffery made him a chocolate milkshake, but put some Ensure in it so he was getting some nutrition out of it. I thought that was pretty cool.

I got to help cut up some of the pita chips to be fried as well as prepare the hummus.

I didn’t get to help with this beautiful fruit platter but Jeffery did a great job and it was too pretty to not take a picture of!

One of my jobs was to skewer all of this chicken so it could be cooked for a catering job!

I got to make this massive salad, which could feed about 5 people.

On Wednesday, I was able to do some patient services tasks for food service. One thing I did was a test tray. Jessica and I put in an order for breakfast, then we took it upstairs to the nurse’s station. Then, we asked a nurse to taste test the food that the patient gets, and whoever does it gets a ticket for a free lunch. The food is tested for temperature as well as taste and appearance from the nurse. It’s a good way for nurses to know what is being served, as well as getting an outside perspective on the food. Then, I went with Jackie (in charge of patient services) to taste test the food on the line. This is done daily to make sure that food is up to par. Then I listened to the meeting she had with her CA’s (catering associates…I think). The CA’s are the people who take the food to the rooms. There were some things that had to be discussed regarding taking orders doing the little things to make sure the patients are satisfied. After that, I went and did Tray Accuracy Assessments. This is just taking the trays as they get loaded onto the cart for delivery and assessing the accuracy of the tray in comparison to the ticket. This is randomly done to make sure that trays are being prepared properly before being delivered to the patient. While I was doing Tray Accuracy, I decided that I wanted to go on a delivery as well. So I went with one of the CAs to deliver her food. The trays that we delivered were to the Mother & Baby floor and Pediatric floor. I got to listen for the “keywords” that they say to the patient and what delivering food entails. Little things like sanitizing your hands on the way in and out, opening up the lid to show the patients the food, as well as setting up the table for them. I enjoyed doing that!

A Tray Accuracy Assessment report.

After delivering the food, I was asked to fill out a shadow report on the CA. She did really well so she got a perfect score.

On Thursday, I got to taste test food on the line again and attend the employee meetings. Because the new patient menu is getting started, the morning meetings always involved progress on that. This was the day I spent the entire day working on menus. I wasn’t actually coming up with any of the food. However, there is a menu that is given to the patients. This file a PDF template, so I wasn’t able to make the changes myself, but instead had to strikethrough the old food (most changed, but not all), and add notes that told the person what foods to add. In the whole 8 hours of working, I was able to get through 5 menus. There is a regular menu, then there are alternate diets for patients with issues that are based on the regular menu. Alternate diets include mechanical soft, GI issues, diabetics, cardiac, renal, etc.

Making changes from the spread, one diet at a time.

This was the spread that I had to look at to change the menus in the PDF document.

While this is basically impossible to read, it’s a screen shot of what one day of one menu looked like. I had do this for a total of 21 meals (7 days x 3 times per day) per diet. It takes so long!!

On Friday, after attending the morning meeting, I helped Jessica a little bit with catering, but then I sat down with Jeffery and he went over financial stuff with me. It is truely amazing what it takes to run quantity food service, including the labor and food orders and all of that kind of stuff! After going over that I did a little bit more menu stuff, but this time it was putting the menu into an excel document that was going to be made into a booklet for the CAs to take with them to rooms. It would have one meal for one day with all of the different diet menus on it. Most of the time the menus are sorted by diet, but having it sorted by day would allow the CAs to not have to flip around. Then I had lunch with everyone, as usual, then went over my evaluation with Jessica.

I enjoyed Memorial and I have so much respect for foodservice and the hard hours all of these people put in to make it happen!

This was a beautiful sunrise around 6:30am that I got to see on the way to Memorial! (Not nutrition related, but it was too pretty to not share!)