Week 4 at University of North Dakota!

I’m not sure if other nutrition majors experience this, but my friends love to make fun of my healthy eating and overall nerdiness towards nutrition. More specifically, my love of oatmeal has become a bit of an ongoing joke between my roommates and I. I have oatmeal for breakfast every single morning, and sometimes for dinner, too if I ran out of groceries. I also tend to get way too excited if I find a new way to spice up my oatmeal. It’s just so versatile and delicious!!!

You can imagine how excited I was when I was given the opportunity to show off some of my oatmeal recipes this past week at Squires Dining Center. A dream come true! For both Monday and Tuesday, we served one dish of plain oatmeal and one dish of a different hot cereal. We accompanied the dishes with a plethora of fun toppings! Monday we served a Sunrise Quinoa Hot Cereal blend made with orange juice, honey, and soymilk. On Tuesday we served for the first time a four grain hot cereal with farro, grano, quinoa, and freekeh. It was actually delicious! On both days, I used a bit of creativity to market suggestions for what to do with the hot cereal. I suggested peanut butter and banana oatmeal, carrot cake oatmeal, apple pie hot cereal, and a fruity sunrise cereal. My hope is that other people will learn to appreciate oatmeal as much as I do.

Carrot cake oatmeal...It's delicious, I promise!

On both days, I stayed working at Squires during lunch time, where I assisted with the salad bar. I worked the specialty salad station, where I created a specific salad plate that we had advertised as being served in the dining center. Monday’s salad was a fajita salad and Tuesday’s was a Caribbean salad. The bright colors from the fruit in the Caribbean salad made it a big hit! One of my projects this summer was to come up with more specialty salads to be served, so I am hoping to see some of my recipes in the dining center over the next few weeks!

Me feeling awkward about posing for a picture while making salad

Caribbean salad--with mangoes, pineapple, mandarin oranges,
 craisins, and cashews. Yum.

The rest of the week I was back in the office for the first time in what felt like forever. I was joined by another dietetics student from UND, Haley, who is working with Dustin for the next few weeks as well.  We began to do some research on allergen free recipes that will be served in the allergen free concept in the renovated Wilkerson Dining center this fall. This has proved to be a bit tricky—eliminating any recipes with the eight common allergies plus gluten. Most of the recipes are confined to meat and vegetable dishes, but we are able to work with a few unique allergen-free products such as dairy-free cheese, and some gluten free breads, pastas, and tortillas. This coming week Haley and I will be able to help out recipe testing some of the ideas we have come up with!

Just another reason to love this internship....SAMPLES!!! 

On Thursday, I spent the morning with Anne, another dietitian working on campus, and one of her students for the summer, Christine. Christine is working on bringing a farmer’s market to UND’s campus one day this September...AMAZING IDEA! I tagged along with the two of them to a meeting with an RD, Mandy, working for the Grand Forks Public Health Department. Mandy holds weekly farmer’s markets for the city’s employees during the summer and even offers incentive of up to four extra hours of vacation time for employees attending the farmer’s market and other health-promoting events. She had plenty of advise to share with us as to how we can make the farmer’s market successful. I also helped Christine water some of the community gardens that her and Anne have set up around campus. They are growing herbs, tomatoes, peppers, and lettuce that are available for anyone around campus to take!

After our meeting, Anne, Christine, and I detoured to a local chocolate
 shop known for their chocolate covered potato chips!

The weather this weekend was beautiful!! (That is aside from our tornado warning on Saturday night...) My weekends are starting to look really similar-- sleeping in, biking or running outside, and hanging out with the friends I have made here. At first, I thought I was going to be bored without having a car here, but I am actually enjoying this change of pace. I'm starting to feel more at home here at UND...which is almost sad since I'm just about halfway done with my internship! I can't wait to see what the next few weeks have in store for me.