This week, I worked to update prices in the Compnutrition system. While an online nutrition system is definitely beneficial, it cannot work well without regular updating and maintenance. I also continued to plan decorations for the upcoming Slider/Fun food event on August 13th. This week was full of field trips as well!
On Tuesday, I spent a day at King Arthur Flour. King Arthur Flour happens to have a bakery outlet on campus, so I definitely was crossing enemy lines for the day baking with the competitor. However, a little friendly competition never hurt anyone! Their flagship store and education center is located in nearby Norwich, Vermont. There I spent the day in the bakery learning about the bread and pastry operations. Approaching the bakery at the golden hour of 6 a.m. I knew it was going to be a delicious, sugar filled day as the sweet scent of pastries wafted outside the bakery door. I definitely had to ignore the little nutritionist inside me for the day. After all, when do you get to spend an entire day in a bakery learning and sampling as you go? Copious amounts of sugar and carbohydrates were consumed for the sake of learning! That's what I told myself, at least. Yummy looking sticky buns, ciabatta rolls, cookies, cakes, and baguettes rolled out of the enormous ovens. When I say enormous, I mean these ovens were as big as my bathroom back at school. Huge! I got to scoop and portion their almond cloud cookies. Almond is probably my favorite flavor on the planet, so I was just a little excited. I had to fight the urge to take a spoon, dive in, and devour the entire mixer full of dough. The windows surrounding the bakery were definitely a deterrent. People would peek in to see what was going on all day, and no one wants to see a baker mowing down all the cookies they are about to buy. I hear that doesn't promote good business. I also got to make pizzas, and glaze sticky buns. One of my favorite parts was seeing all of the different breads being made. I dearly love making all types of cakes, cookies, brownies, bars, and other sweet confections, but bread making is still very mysterious to me. Seeing all the different flours and techniques used to produce different loaves of bread with different textures and flavors convinced me that bread making isn't an art but a craft. Each baker at King Arthur was machine-like in the production of bread following a set of rules and instructions so ingrained into their brain and their hands that they would fall into a trance-like state. In a smooth motion under the veil of flying flour, a perfectly shaped loaf would appear each time. I can only imagine the years of practice and precision behind each loaf of bread. I left King Arthur Flour with a belly full of carbohydrates and a new appreciation for the art baking.
Freshly baked rye loaves are resting before being served.
If rye loaves are not allowed to rest, they will
be gummy. See those beautiful X's on the tops?
They were done by yours truly.
This is a rack full of the bread items produced daily at King Arthur Flour.
This is me with baguette in hand at the end of a day filled with baked goods!
On Wednesday, I got the chance to attend a lunch and discussion over the topic of sustainability. Hal Hamilton, the featured guest, is a founder of the The Sustainable Food Lab. Students, farmers, professors, and businesses sat down to discuss sustainability from their different points of view. It was truly eye opening to see farmers interacting with business owners and students to explore solutions that would fulfill everyone on the food chain's needs while taking care of the environment. Many times this leads to solutions that are contradictory, that is, they may work well for one sector of the food chain but cannot work for another. For example, local small farms are a viable solution in terms of saving energy to transport produce. However, local small farms alone cannot meet the demands of a large dining facility like Dartmouth. Needless to say, sustainability is a multifaceted issue that can be frustratingly ambiguous at times. Creative, open minded solutions are essential if a meeting of the minds is to take place. Discussions such as this one are a promising start to solving the mammoth problem of sustainability.
To balance out my carb-filled Tuesday, I ate my fair share of fat and protein at the Harpoon BBQ festival in Windsor, Vermont on Saturday. This was yet another opportunity to ignore that pesky nutritionist telling me not to eat the beef fat French fries and pulled pork tacos. By the way, both were delicious. It has to be a rule somewhere that you can't attend a BBQ festival without eating ribs. I sampled four different ribs. I wish I had kept track of who I had got them from because one was really good! Don Reed, my supervisor, and Matt Smith, another DDS employee in charge of catering and accounting, both judged the event. They gave us the inside scoop, and said the pulled chicken was the definite winner of the day. By that time I was way too full to sample anything else, so I didn't get to try any chicken. Later that afternoon, Matt and Erin Smith took me to Queechee Gorge to swim and tour the neighboring Vermont towns of White River Falls, Woodstock, and Norwich. We capped off the day with ice cream in Woodstock. I had such a fun, food-filled day! I can't thank Matt and Erin enough for showing me around the area.
The infamous Beef Fat Fries... so so good!
No stains yet! Preparing to eat some BBQ!
Don't worry! These aren't all mine.
This is the beautiful Queechee Gorge. I swam down there!
This concludes another week. Next week I'll be looking forward to a production day at Collis Café and visit to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. It will be another exciting week at DDS.
No comments:
Post a Comment