Weeks 3 & 4 at Ferris State

Weeks 3 and 4 wrapped up our portion of line cooking and learning the different stations. One of my favorite stations to work at The Rock is World's Fare. WF serves a meal for lunch and dinner with themes from all over the world... Spain, Peru, Greece, Mexico, Italy, China... the list goes on and on! During week 3 I worked closely with one of the food service workers, Tina, and she taught me how to make Chicken Cacciatore. We started off with the sauce-- the most important part-- and cooked up some onions, green peppers, olives, tomatoes, garlic, spices and burgundy wine. The smell was AMAZING. We then baked the chicken in the sauce, seasoned penne with Italian spices and mixed green beans with toasted almonds and lemon pepper seasoning.

Here's a photo of the finished plate:

Throughout the past 2 weeks I've helped with a variety of prepping and serving food. During week 3 Brenda took us on a nice field trip to Gregory's Asparagus Farm. The couple who run the farm were very friendly and showed us around the farm; they even let us get on the tractor and pick some asparagus. It is much more difficult than it looks!

Our tractor ride around the farm.

On the cart picking asparagus!

Our next big field trip was to Gordon Food Service, the food distributor for Ferris as well as a large portion of Michigan and the midwest. We were able to tour the inside of the warehouse where food is received, sorted, stored and shipped out. We were also able to meet with one of the RDs for GFS and received a nice and informative presentation about the importance of nutrition and the food service industry.

The weeks have been going by very quickly here in Big Rapids, and I am very optimistic about my next 4 weeks!