UW Madison Week #5

Monday and Tuesday:

I worked in Carson Gulley the last two days under the direction of Kevin Contny. I worked on the line for the lunch rush making and serving burgers and other grilled items. During the lunch period I also did a yield test study on French fries to see if our serving sizes were accurate. I worked with CBORD again today to do some forecasting for the week of July 20^th. We used last week’s numbers so we had to take into account the holiday weekend.

On Tuesday, I started by preparing the desserts for lunch and dinner. I served at Que Rico during lunch which is set up somewhat like Chipotle. I made burritos, quesadillas, nachos, and rice bowls. People seemed very pleased with the meals they received. It was very busy for the majority of lunch. Kevin went over the core values of housing with me today which are care, creativity, excellence, integrity, optimism, respect, and stewardship.

Wednesday:

bulgugi nachos

Today I worked at the stations in Rheta’s. They only served lunch today and it was for a group of about 60 people. I worked at the burger station again and helped clean the flat top, hood vents, and fryers. They were also testing a recipe for bulgugi nachos which are Korean nachos. They were pretty tasty. 

We had the opportunity to tour the athletic facilities at Camp Randall today with the registered dietitian, Karla. UW Madison has separate dining facilities for their athletes. There are two dining halls where athletes eat full meals and a lot of different fueling stations throughout the training facilities. The training stations have a lot of different protein powders, supplies to make smoothies, bagels, trail mixes and some other items.

Karla is in charge of ordering for the fueling stations and she works with the chefs in the dining facilities on site to ensure proper nutrition. She works one on one with some of the athletes and also leads educational classes for freshman athletes during their first semester to get them on board with nutrition. She also runs some cooking classes for the athletes to show them good meals to make when they are not eating in the facility.

She works a lot with the football team during the fall season. She travels to all away games and arrives a few days before the team to make sure everything is in line when the team arrives. The Friday night pregame meal is always the same no matter where they are and she plans all of the other meals for when they are out of town.

Hearing about Karla’s work really made me start thinking about working as a sports dietitian again. This was my first goal when entering into the field but I found out early on that the jobs are very hard to come by. Being able to talk to her about her journey made me feel more confident in my ability to work in this industry.

Thursday:

I worked at Rheta’s again today. Tony had me do some work on the computer entering meal counts. Keeping track of these helps with forecasting for future weeks where they have a similar menu. I did a test recipe for baked pasta in the pizza oven. It turned out that the baking dish held the same serving size as the normal pasta dishes served at Buena Cochina.

I talked to Mike, one of the chefs, for a while about the events they cater out of Rhetas. These include pizza parties, cookies, ice cream parties, etc.  The students can order online and they prefer to have the orders in 72 hours in advance.

I attended another allergy meeting at Gordon today. There was a representative from each dining unit at the meeting. We talked about how we can keep allergen free foods safe in the preparation process. Each unit will have designated prep materials to deal with gluten free items. They are all purple which helps to ensure they don’t get mixed in with other materials.

Elvis Panini

At the end of my shift, I went over to Carson's to test one of our recipes for the theme meal. We tested the Elvis Panini recipe. Because there is a high number of people with peanut allergies eating at this facility we may have to change the peanut butter to sunbutter which is made out of sunflower seeds.

Friday:

Miranda and I spent the day working on our healthier America promotion project. We came up with some pretty cool ideas to get the word out to students. We also created healthy bundle options for students to choose from at each meal period. These meals follow very strict criteria limiting: calories, saturated fat, sodium, and item content.

To find items that fit in the healthy bundles we used CBORD. It tells us the nutrition content per serving of the item and we can also look up all the ingredients that go into the recipe this way. It was very difficult to find meals that fit the criteria that would also be appealing to students but we did it.