Menus Menus Menus. UND Week 2!

This week went so quickly! I was busy all week working on various projects and I am sure the rest of the summer is going to fly by. Let me tell you a bit about what I did.

The Art Fest/Farmers Market in downtown Grand Forks on Saturday

Monday
Monday I had to come into Wilkerson early to experience inventory in the main dining center. I showed up at 6 am and started counting inventory (after a quick cup of coffee, of course) in some of the store rooms. Even though inventory is something a lot of people in retail (foodservice or otherwise) experience, I had never done it before. After working with Food Pro a bit and having more of an understanding of menu forecasting, I knew that this was probably the most important step in the cycle. With an inaccurate inventory, everything else down the line would be messed up -- forecasting, purchasing, production -- everything!

Since it was our executive chef Greg's first day back after his week of vacation last week, we had another manager meeting for all of the Wilkerson managers. One interesting thing we went over was looking at the menu to see if anything would need to be adjusted because our tip kettles were going to be replaced and would be out of service for the week. Of course, Pasta Bar was going to be featured as the specialty entree on Wednesday, so the managers had to decide the best course of action -- switch the entree or figure out another way to make the pasta. The managers decided that we could still go ahead with pasta bar, but we would make all of the pasta on Tuesday night, before the kettles were removed, and re-steam it on Wednesday before service. Smart!

Tuesday
Monday and Tuesday are major number crunching days for the managers here. Inventory is done Monday, and Forecasting is done Tuesday. I was able to watch Dan, one of the unit managers for Wilkerson, go through the process of reconciling the inventory count and forecast for the next menu, three weeks in advance. Last week, this process was SUPER confusing to try and get a handle on. After seeing an entire week of operation and putting the pieces together, it made so much more sense to me. SO much goes on behind the scenes to keep the business up and running smoothly, and it takes an enormous amount of human effort to make sure the computers are doing everything correctly.

Tuesday I was also able to shadow the cold prep staff in the kitchen to get a better idea of who I will be presenting my Food Handling Safety Inservice to later this month. They prep all of the food for the allergy-free station first thing in the morning -- to make sure there is as little cross contamination as possible. When I showed up, one of the very nice prep cooks, Erna, was portioning pineapple and watermelon into plastic cups. Erna also showed me how the prep cooks record service records. After they finish prepping their item, they weigh it and record how much they prepared. After service, the amount left over is recorded, and this way they can measure how much of that particular item they actually served. Pretty neat!

I spent the rest of the day outlining my lesson plan for the inservice. I'm so excited to present it! Stuff like this is right up my ally and I hope I can turn Food Safety into something super exciting for the staff (however challenging a task that may be..)

My workstation where all of the magic happens ;)

Basically, I will have three 45-minute presentations for the cold prep staff on proper Food Handling/Food Safety to better prepare them to pass the ServSafe exam. I am thanking all my goodnesses that I learned all about ServSafe and passed the exam this past year, so I'm actually a qualified educator! (Thanks Monica!) I'm using Prezi to develop presentations because I think they are inherently more engaging than a powerpoint. I'm also incorporating lots of group activities like quizzes, worksheets, and a case study, to keep people interested and also help them learn from each other.

Tuesday night I was surprised to hear the door to my suite being unlocked at 9pm! Jane, my new suitemate, is from South Korea and will be at UND for the whole year interning with Dining. She graduated from university in Korea with a degree in Dietetics, and is spending her year here learning more about international nutrition. She's super sweet and her english is excellent! (Even if she doesn't think so). I'm happy to have a suitemate finally! I'd be lying if I said I wasn't getting a little lonely in this dorm all by myself.

Wednesday
Wednesday was a busy day! We started menu planning for Wilkerson for the upcoming fall menu, going through breakfast and lunch to determine what needed to be changed. I've said it before, but I'll say it again -- I love working with the menus. Now that Chef Greg is back, recipe testing is in full swing. Cooks are constantly making new things that we get to try and that might make it on the menu. One of the main things we are testing is proper cooking of a bunch of different types of whole grain products (farro, grano, quinoa, etc) that we hope to incorporate into hot breakfast cereals among other recipes. A major thing cooks are trying to figure out is how much water to use and how long to cook the grain to get the proper texture. Recipe testing is definitely a tasty task.

My station during menu planning -- looking up acceptabilties in Food Pro and making changes to the menu spreadsheet

Discussing possible menu changes for fall at Wilkerson

The majority of Wednesday was spent working on developing a new menu for the extensive salad bar at Wilkerson. The one that currently displays on the internet doesn't include all of the many offerings on the salad bar and the portion sizes are listed in ounces. Since the average customer might not be thinking in ounces, we wanted to create a new menu with portions in tablespoons, cups, and slices (for things like pepperoni and pickles). It sounds simple enough, but there was a lot of behind the scenes work that had to happen before we could just change the portion sizes on the menu. We had to create a "fake" menu in Food Pro that wouldn't be used to forecast needs -- it would just be used for the web. On here, we incorporated all of the existing recipes for things like veggies, fruits, toppings, condiments, dressings, etc. etc. (you really have to see the salad bar here, it's HUGE. Note to self: TAKE A PICTURE!!) but some of them were old and had to be updated with products that were actually being used. For the many recipes that had to be re-portioned, I worked with Laura to find the weight of whatever serving we needed (a half cup of corn, 5 cherry tomatoes, etc.) and created new recipes in Food Pro. Once we finally finished all of the background work, we could finally organize the menu in Food Pro. Even then, though, I had to go back and adjust some of the little things, like marking which options were vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, or received a guiding star rating.

I had to enter new nutritional information into Food Pro for some of the newer products like this dressing

Thursday
Thursday was filled with more of the same from this week, but was still busy! More menu  planning happened for Wilkerson, this time for the soups and pizzas.

Laura and I had to go over to the dining center at the Memorial Union for Lunch on Thursday to help control traffic for the students here for orientation. (Funny sidenote for everyone from Madison reading this: UND has a Memorial Union and their dining center is called The Terrace! Doesn't quite match up to ours, though ;)) I felt a little funny directing traffic in a location I really knew nothing about -- I had only been to Terrace once before -- but it ended up going fine. The only concern was that a huge group of people would show up at one time and end up crowding the first thing they saw. Our task was to make sure everyone knew were to go to get hot food and how the flow of the dining center was set up. I think we did pretty well!

The rest of Thursday was spent finishing the Salad Bar project I described up there ^^.

Thursday evening was fun. Jane and I met my friend Alex, her roommate, and her roommate's sister for pizza at this place called Rhombus Guy's downtown. Alex said great things about it when she showed me around, and I knew with pizza you couldn't really go wrong. It was absolutely delicious! I treated myself to a glass of Oberon and had a few slices of both the Margherita and Chipotle Steak pizza (I picked off the pieces of steak). YUM. After our bellies were full, Jane and I drove down to Target and Best Buy to pick her up a few things she needed, as well as a new laptop! We both got back to our rooms and were completely exhausted. Best night of sleep ever!

Friday
Since I worked a little bit later on Monday, I was able to leave a bit early today since I had weekend plans of driving back to the Twin Cities to surprise my dad for Fathers Day! (I can write this now since I'm home and he has already been happily surprised :))

Today was a more relaxed day in terms of tasks. I had a few phone calls with people -- one was with an event planner from the CVB for Grand Forks to begin working with them on getting informational material about Grand Forks for the registration packets for the attendees of the Food Pro Conference. Another was with a contact from the Guiding Stars company just confirming the project I'll be working on with them, submitting some more items for rating with their very specific photography procedure.

Otherwise, I mainly spent the day making finishing touches to the online menus for the Salad Bar at Wilkerson and finishing my Food Handling Training presentations. I was out of there by 2:30 thanks to a very kind Dustin and on the road by 3.

One of my favorite paintings that is lining the wall of the Tunnel from my dorm to Wilkerson. I get to walk past it every day!

I'm excited for a weekend at home with family. Happy Fathers day, dads!!