Spring Break, Cooking Club, and the Campus Kitchen

This week Gonzaga College High School is on spring break, but that doesn't mean the Campus Kitchen is slowing down! With help from the Cooking Club, a group that has cooking sessions to teach students culinary skills, we continued our usual output of meals.

We've tried our best in the past to make cooking shifts fun and educational, but they haven't always been both. Luckily, the moderators of the Cooking Club brought expertise and excitement to the shifts! For our Monday cooking shift, we prepared over 100 meals for delivery on Tuesday and Friday. The Cooking Club graciously donated almost all of the food for the spring break.

The contents of the first meal are:

Protein: Orange pork chops
Vegetable: Green beans
Starch: Cheesy mashed potatoes
Dessert: Brownies

(We also provided after-dinner mints for our clients.)

We cut the bones out of the pork chops with kitchen shears and then proceeded to glaze them with orange marmalade and honey dijon mustard. Volunteers sprinkled chives on the pork in the frying pan. We received a shipment of baked potatoes from one of our donors, so we peeled them, and added sour cream, milk, and cheese to make cheesy mashed potatoes. We had a difficult time mashing them up but it all worked out in the end!

Senior Tom Mason helps cook the pork chops!

We usually would have stopped with one set of meals, but we were having so much fun that we plowed ahead with a super-sized cooking shift and made double meals!

The second set of meals we made included:

Protein: Chicken cacciatore
Starch: Egg noodles
Vegetable: Salad
Dessert: Cookies or eclaires
Dressing: Ranch or Italian

(After-dinner mints were included, too.)

The recipe used for the chicken cacciatore called for green peas, so volunteers added them to the chicken cacciatore and spooned everything over egg noodles for the entree. For the salad, we used two bags of shredded lettuce donated from our donor, Brock. We also had celery donated from our other donor, Venable, but not much else. We added shredded carrots and cherry tomatoes the day of delivery to complete them. Previously when we've made salads (and we've made them many many many many times), we didn't put dressing on because it would make the lettuce soggy. The Cooking Club moderators brought in tiny plastic cups and tops to put salad dressing in. When we delivered the meals, we gave clients a choice of ranch or Italian dressing. Brilliant! For dessert, to top everything off, we made a batch of chocolate chip cookies.

Senior Tom Mason and sophomore Martin Ellsworth making cookies.

After all was said and done, the Cooking Club prepared over 100 meals of exceptional quality for delivery. The skills that volunteers learned, including cutting and frying pork, are ones that we have not taught before. Volunteers seemed happy to have so much actual cooking to do. This Spring Break cooking shift was very successful and hopefully the Cooking Club and Campus Kitchen can collaborate again in the future.