During my first week in the kitchen, I experienced a wide variety of jobs that were a part of kitchen life at Proctor. Although I was often involved in the making of many dishes (mostly preparation work) such as the pizza on Friday or the rice pilaf on Thursday’s Earth Day, I still did non-cooking related jobs such as cleaning the main dinning hall after lunch and cleaning utensils in the dish room. Those jobs as small as they are, are just as important (well not quite, but still pretty important) as cooking the food itself. If we didn’t clean the dinning hall, students and staff would be eating in a dirty dinning hall with leftover meats and other garbage strewn all over the tables or at the deli bar. For me at least, I would like to eat in a clean dinning hall as I’m sure most everyone would. From doing these jobs, I’ve learned the importance of teamwork. In a place such as a kitchen where everyone is trying to get things done to get meals out on time, teamwork is absolutely essential in getting everything done successfully. If you do your part, people are more than happy to help you when you are struggling.
I think the biggest eye opener for me this week was that the amount of work you put into preparing a dish is five times more than the time it takes for the dish to disappear in the dinning hall (most of the time). For example on Friday, I started work at 6:30 to make the dough for the pizza and took the last tray of pizzas out of the oven at 12:30. By 1:30, most of the 800 pieces of pizza were eaten. Watching all your hard work disappear in a flash really was a shock for me. As a student I probably would’ve never realized it took that long to make the pizzas. I would just come in, grab a couple of slices and eat. When people come and eat in the dinning hall, I hope they think about the amount of effort it takes for the kitchen staff to make all the food that they do before they complain that the food is terrible. Working in the kitchen has definitely made me more conscientious about not wasting food (not that I do waste food to begin with).
I think one of the benefits of being a student at Proctor and now an employee of the kitchen allows me to have a clear understanding of what the dinning hall food is like from the student’s point of view and the kitchen’s point of view. I know from sitting around kids in the dinning hall that many of them don’t like the food. Everyone has their own reasons, but it’s usually because the food looks disgusting. Whenever I hear someone say that I ask them, “Why do you judge the food based on what it looks like? You haven’t even tasted or smelled it yet!” The usual answer to this is, “Well, it still looks gross so I won’t try it.” Ever since I came to Proctor, I couldn’t understand why students are so narrow minded with the food in the dinning hall. I know it’s not five star cuisine, but for a small boarding school in New Hampshire I think the food is pretty good. Whenever people from home ask me what the food is like here, as an example I tell them we get eggs, pancakes, potatoes of some sort and other breakfast things, for lunch we get Sloppy Joe’s, pasta, pizza and for dinner we have fish (sometimes salmon), sometimes roast beef and sometimes Seafood Newberg. I also tell them we have a salad bar for lunch and dinner. By the time I’m done, they’re all usually shell shocked. How many boarding schools serve Seafood Newberg? Not many.
One of the frustrations I have experienced since starting senior project is that since I told the whole school in assembly I would be working in the kitchen, many people often come up and ask me “What’s for dinner?” or “When are they going to have___?” or “You should have____ more often.” This gets pretty annoying after awhile because although I work in the kitchen, I have no say in what the kitchen buys or extremely little say in what they make. I just do what I’m told to do and that’s that. People also have to remind themselves that there is a budget for food and that limits the kitchen to what they can prepare and serve.
For my first week in the kitchen, I would say I have a pretty good idea what it’s like working in a place like Proctor’s kitchen. Being able to do a variety of things certainly helps that. Next week, Nate and Kevin are allowing me to prepare a few dishes of my own for some of the meals. I still however have yet to decide what they will be, but it should be good nonetheless. Although I’m nervous about preparing my own food for the school, I think everyone will support me. I just hope the dishes live up to the students and the faculty/staffs’ expectation.
Overall, I liked what I’ve accomplished during my first week. From scooping cookies and peeling potatoes on Monday to chopping vegetables for the quiche and almost completely preparing the pizzas by myself by Friday, I’ve learned something new each day. As I begin my second week of senior project, I hope it will be as exciting as this first week.
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