In another case, I was taking an outdoor education course, and, as a graduation exercise, we ran an outdoor school for a particular school elementary school. We did all the planning, taught all the activities, and but had the teaching staff of the elementary school, whose students we were running through the program, attend, partly for legal responsibility, and for their oversight, and also a bit of a break for them. The instructor for our outdoor education course felt that it would be a great thing if we could do absolutely everything ourselves, including the cooking. So, having demonstrated some cooking prowess in other events that we did during the year, I was kind of volunteered for the job.
This type of cooking, of course, involves not just cooking but meal planning, inventory planning, and shopping. There's a bit of budgeting involved there as well. In this particular case, students in the outdoor education course, and the instructor, felt that it would be a good idea to have cooking be one of the activities. I warned them that having such an extensive program centered around the kitchen would require a lot of work on their part. Everyone assured me that they would be helping out in the kitchen when they weren't doing their own activities.
On the first day of this outdoor school, none of my fellow students did show up at the kitchen to help out. The teachers, whose students we were teaching, did come to the kitchen. The first day of setting up in a kitchen is pretty hectic, so I didn't have an awful lot of time to school them in the niceties of cooking in preparation for eighty people, but I got out the large baking sheets, cut up appropriate portions of bread dough, and instructed them to roll or flatten the dough out so that it completely covered the baking sheets. This was, of course, in preparation for pizza. While I was working on the other side of the kitchen I could hear mutterings from the side where the teachers were working about how impossible a task this was. Bread dough is elastic stuff, and you have to stretch it further than you need, so that it will snap back to the right size. In addition, of course, bread dough is not the toughest construction material in the universe, and, if you pull it too much, it will tear. So the teachers were muttering away to each other about how the lumps of dough were too small, and this was impossible, and various other things. I had an awful lot of work to do, but finally I had enough, walked over to their side of the kitchen, took one of the baking sheets, took the smallest lump of bread dough that I had given them, rolled it out so that it more than filled the pan that I was working on, took a knife and cut off the excess around the edges of the pan, and then used the excess pieces to patch the holes in the bread dough in their pans. And then walked back to my side of the kitchen where I was working on salads, without saying a word. There was a short pause in the muttering, and then the comment, "Oh. I guess it is possible." They continued work without further comment.
Pizza is a great meal, but it does require a little dietary balance, and so I had planned for a quantity of salad to be the adjunct to this meal. At the appointed time, one of my fellow students showed up with the group of elementary students who were to have the cooking lesson for this particular activity. Again, I still had a ton of work to do to get ready for dinner, but the group was there and they needed the activity. There were about a dozen of them and I had a dozen heads of iceberg lettuce, for the salad. I got the students around a work table in the kitchen, and rolled a head of lettuce to each of them around the table. Then I showed them how to identify where the core of the lettuce was, and demonstrated holding the lettuce up above your head (making sure that the stem was on the bottom), and then bringing the head of lettuce down sharply on the table surface. This breaks the attachment of the core to all the leaves in the head of lettuce, and you can then turn the head of lettuce over, and simply pull out the core. It's a lot easier this way, particularly when you're doing a lot of salad and need a lot of lettuce, than slicing up the heads and individually cutting out the pieces of core.
Again, I know that none of my fellow students showed up to help in the kitchen that day. Every evening after the kids were bunked into their cabins, we had a debriefing meeting. At that evening's debriefing meeting I noted that I had had no help in the kitchen that day, and that I felt that, while I could possibly continue to provide the meals, that I wasn't sure that I would also be able to do cooking activities for the elementary students attending the outdoor school. All of my fellow students objected. One told me, "We have been teaching them canoeing, first aid, nature walks, and a bunch of other things, and do you know what everyone, in every cabin, is talking about tonight? How to take the core out of a head of lettuce. You've got to keep on doing the cooking lessons." So we continued with the cooking lessons.
Of course, I didn't get any more help in the kitchen. I struggled through, but, by about Wednesday night, I figured that I needed to speak up again. I again reiterated that they had promised to help in the kitchen, and weren't helping in the kitchen. One of my fellow outdoor education students agreed that they had fallen down on the job. But she said she had a solution. She would take over as the lead cook, my fellow students would help in the kitchen, and I would have the day off. Completely. I thought about it for about 15 seconds and figured that the resulting disaster probably wouldn't actually kill anybody. So I agreed. The menu was planned and noted, and all the recipes were available. The provisions were stocked in the kitchen. I knew there would be problems, but I figured that it wouldn't be problems that anybody was not going to survive. I figured that I would just stay completely away from the kitchen, not interfere, not assist, and that people might learn a valuable lesson.
I was right. Breakfast, the next morning, was a half an hour late. Lunch, despite the fact that yes, my fellow students did rally around their new head cook, was 45 minutes late. Dinner was an hour and a quarter late. I stayed out of the kitchen. Although after dinner I did go up to one of the serving hatches where the new head cook was resting, and looking very tired. I asked her how her feet were. She looked up, rather woebegone, and said, "I think that's what hurts the most." I nodded.
Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/01/mgg-1d1-cooking.html
Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html
Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/01/mgg-1d3-cooking.html
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