Week 8 and We're Done

First, I just have to say that I can't believe this internship is over! Time has flown faster than ever. Even though I've spent most of my afternoon packing, it still doesn't really feel like I'm leaving yet. This whole summer I just kept thinking that there was no way each week could keep getting better and offer something new. I was definitely wrong. This last week was amazing and I really enjoyed it!

Monday Jeanette and I were in the test kitchen. We were working on prep for our food truck special, fish tacos. We tried to get as much prepped as we could so that Tuesday would be smooth sailing! We chopped some things up, made the blackening seasoning, and I made all of the tomatillo salsa that we would need...and then some. Has anyone ever said, "man I have way too much tomatillo salsa?" Didn't think so, so a little extra won't hurt our favorite chefs in the test kitchen, right? :) In the afternoon, we had to cook up a sample for a display plate. Jenna from culinary services came to take a picture of our special so that it could go on the food truck website to entice people to come eat it! I really enjoyed working on the display plate. It's such an art to arrange food for pictures. Lary is really good at this! He helped me create a beautiful plate. I'll have to remember his tricks for the future. Jeanette even sneakily took a picture of Lary in action, which is a pretty big deal since he is the master of avoiding photographs. Sorry Lary :) Jenna came and took some pictures of the tacos for us and got a few quotes from Jeanette and I so that she could write this blog post. The NACUFS facebook page even linked to the article! I felt pretty cool when that popped up in my facebook news feed. 

Here's a screenshot of the Food Truck website with the description of our special

Jenna in action taking pictures for us

Jeanette and I

This is the picture we ended up using for the website. Looks tasty right?

Tuesday was the big day! We started the morning by finishing up all of the prep work that we needed to do. Then we loaded up the truck and headed out! We started the day very strong. The first seven people that came to the truck all ordered our tacos! It made me so excited. The tacos stayed pretty popular throughout the day. I even had some people tell me that they came to the food truck just because they saw online that we were having fish tacos. Jeanette and I met some really nice customers and got to tell a few of them about our internship and our food truck project. Unfortunately, the rainstorms decided they wanted to visit the food truck as well. It started pouring while we were out there, so that slowed down our flow of customers. Luckily it cleared up a bit later, but I think the heavy rain scared a lot of people away. Because of the rain we only had forty something sales, but 31 of those were the fish tacos! Not bad odds at all! We got a lot of good feedback from the customers about the quality and taste of our tacos. I'm definitely going to be making these at home :) I really enjoyed this project and am so glad that Kari and Gina gave us the opportunity to create something. It was so exciting to see something I helped create come together from start to finish and actually be sold and well received by customers. It made me so happy to watch people eating our fish tacos! I hope interns in future years get to do something like this. 

Here's a description and sample plate on the food truck

Most of those lucky people are munching on our fish tacos!

It takes more than rain to shut down these NACUFS interns 

I loved the food truck

I of course gladly supported my own special for lunch

Wednesday was our final day. We started by helping the food truck with some of its morning prep work. Then Jeanette and I got ready for our final lunch. We ate at the State Room, the restaurant in the Kellogg Center on campus. Lary and Saul were there, as well as some other people from dining services. It was a really fun group to eat with and the food was phenomenal. I tried their crab cakes, which were delicious! They tasted so fresh and had lots of good flavor. I also tried their firecracker shrimp, which was shrimp with almond pesto served on grits with Gouda cheese in them. I wish I had taken pictures of my meal so that I could try to portray how amazing this food was. I don't think a picture could do it justice anyways. We also had yummy desserts. Mine was peach melba, which was peaches with MSU vanilla ice cream and a raspberry sauce. I've got your mouth watering don't I? It was such a tasty meal. Jeanette and I also got our NACUFS internship completion certificate and an MSU goodie bag. It was the perfect end to an awesome two months here.

Jeanette and I in the Kellogg Center

I've been looking through all of the pictures I've taken this summer and thinking about my time here at MSU. I still can't believe I was blessed with this amazing opportunity. It was such a great experience to be able to meet so many people and be able to immerse myself in so many different facets of university dining. I also feel very blessed to have been at Michigan State. This university has so many different things going on in their dining services department. I'm so glad that I got to experience all of those different aspects. MSU is definitely a front runner for university dining services. The kids that go to school here don't know how lucky they are to have so much great food at their disposal. This internship was an incredible opportunity and I'll definitely always remember it fondly. As Matt said at lunch today, even though I was only here for 2 months, I'm still a Spartan for life.