Students cook up a great idea

November 19, 2008

By Tim Johnson, Free Press Staff Writer • November 19, 2008

She had never carved a ham before, but there Kate Turcotte was Monday afternoon in a dining hall kitchen, learning how. Somebody had to — in just about 24 hours, scores of people would be gathering in Burlington for a “holiday meal,” with ham as the main offering.

After a quick ham anatomy lesson and a brisk carving demonstration by dining hall staff, Turcotte set to work, and before long she was down to the bone, with enough slices to serve 50 people or so.

Not bad for a vegetarian.

Turcotte, a senior at the University of Vermont, is a spearhead of a new student project called Campus Kitchen, which takes unused food from the dining halls and other sources and turns it into meals for the community. The project began this week with preparation of a meal to be served Tuesday evening at the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf.

When Turcotte and about 10 other student leaders convened in the Simpson Hall kitchen Monday afternoon for what amounted to a hands-on seminar on cooking for a multitude, it was the culmination of a year’s planning that enlisted a range of project partners, from commercial food donors to dining hall administrators themselves. They spent 2½ hours carving, mixing, slicing and chopping in the first go-through of what they expect will become a weekly ritual after the first of the year.

For some, it was novel experience. Sarah Heim, a UVM staffer who coordinates the project, had never washed 20 pounds of potatoes all at once, but that was one of her jobs. As for cutting up 20 pounds of green beans? Three volunteers shared that chore.

The nonprofit enterprise gets students into the kitchen and ties together the popular themes of local-food reliance and food sustainability. Turcotte, a senior studying ecological agriculture who lives in a vegetarian co-op, is looking forward to yet another phase of the project to start next spring — growing food crops in a half-acre plot UVM has made available for Campus Kitchen.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot to learn about food preparation. Among other rules of thumb: In general, food may be reheated just once, and then to 160 degrees or so. For the holiday meal, most of that warming over would be done in the food shelf’s oven Tuesday afternoon.

Just in case there were patrons averse to ham, there would be a vegetarian option — a tofu stir-fry —that would have to be cooked Tuesday, on the spot.

What about the two ham bones Turcotte produced? They’d be frozen and used to make soup in January.

Getting started

With this startup, UVM joins about a dozen other universities around the country in a project that began in 2001 as an outgrowth of a community kitchen in Washington, D.C.

“What we do is kind of a no-brainer,” says the national Web site of the Campus Kitchens Project. “We know there are people in each community who need nourishing meals And, we know that every college campus has unserved food in its dining halls and brilliant students in its classrooms. So we put them all together.”

A “no-brainer” as a concept, perhaps, but a brain-worthy logistical challenge nevertheless. Monday afternoon’s meal preparation might have been one of the easier tasks, considering that the ingredients were together in one place. All the student leadership team had to do, in a debut performance, was to whip them into a meal for 80 to 100 people.

This was something of a trial run for what Campus Kitchen at UVM hopes to do every week, starting in January. One difference was that almost all the food was donated from community sources other than UVM dining services — in part because putting together the “holiday” menu meant requesting certain items that didn’t happen to be sitting around in campus storerooms.

When the project starts in earnest after the first of the year, the students will have to figure out how to make the most of whatever unused staples or other surplus food the UVM dining halls make available.

For now, food preparation on a commercial/industrial scale is a new experience for many of these students.

“It’s one thing, cooking for a few people,” said Turcotte, a co-coordinator of the project, during a break from learning how to make two gallons of gravy. “Cooking for 80 people is a whole new ballgame.”

Mercifully, Turcotte and the others had a genial and experienced tutor — Tom Oliver, an operations director in UVM’s dining services and a Campus Kitchen adviser. In one task after another Monday, he helped them through the sorts of jobs they’ll soon have to do on their own:

How to bone a ham. How to make unlumpy gravy. How to put potatoes through a food chopper. How to plastic-wrap “hotel pans” full of food so they can be transported without spilling. He demonstrated on a pan of green beans, wrapped two ways, three times.

“We call that catering wrap,” he said, holding up the pan. “Now, no matter what happens ... .” He turned it upside down and nothing fell out.

The regular Simpson Hall menu had been adapted Monday, Oliver said, so that part of the kitchen would be free for the student project to do its thing. Somehow, the regular kitchen staff worked around the students while serving the normal fare in the dining hall just outside. Meanwhile, the Campus Kitchen crew was slicing the green beans, seasoning the squash, melting the butter for the mashed potatoes.

Two pieces of equipment were off-limits to them, Oliver said, even after two sessions on kitchen safety: the slicer and a 15-gallon mixing machine, known as “the mangler,” that would mash the steamed potatoes.

When most everything was done, around 6:30 p.m., Oliver said: “It’s potato time.” They all gathered round the mangler. He dumped in two pans of steamed potatoes — enough to serve about 40 people — turned the machine on, and added butter, milk, salt.

Three times he stopped the whirling machine, and three times they all had a taste, after which he added more salt, butter, parsley. The fourth taste was good. One more batch and they’d be done.

The first dinner

At 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, Turcotte and Heim loaded four food carriers into her purple Honda sedan. A tureen of gravy was on the front passenger seat.

“I’ve been dreaming of this day for a year,” Turcotte said, then drove off to the food shelf.

There was a big crowd at the food shelf for a turkey distribution, but when the day’s allotment ran out, those who remained could assuage their disappointment with a free meal.

The Campus Kitchen serving line got started at 5 p.m., a half-hour early. The line of waiting diners was out the door. The tables filled; the diners were appreciative.

“Very good,” said Danny Connors of Winooski, who had a bit of everything on his plate, plus a slice of pumpkin pie.

“I love it,” said Bill Blood of Burlington.

“I just think it’s great that they’re thinking of other people,” said Michelle Heublein of the food crew, “and that they take the time to make it.”

More than a dozen Campus Kitchen members milled around the kitchen — replenishing empty pans, cutting pies, taking food temperatures. Pete Gossen, a co-coordinator with Turcotte who had been on the squash detail Monday, stuck a thermometer in the last pan of mashed potatoes: 180 degrees. Someone slid it into place.

By 5:40 p.m., the waiting line was gone and people were coming back for seconds. No one kept track of exactly how many meals were served, but 75 plates were used twice. The honey-glazed squash was the first to disappear, then the ham. By 6 p.m., the servers were down to beans, potatoes and gravy.

Even the tofu stir-fry was gone.

Contact Tim Johnson at 660-1808 or tjohnson@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com

November 19, 2008

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