This rotation was completed at St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore and lasted five weeks. Food service is my least favorite area of dietetics, but the rotation was actually quite fun. To clarify, dietitians in food service don't work in food preparation; they typically fill management roles. I knew we weren't going to be assembling patient trays, but I didn't really know what to expect beyond that. My partner and I were assigned to re-write the cafeteria six-week cycle menu which involved planning a specialty entree, two meat entrees, one vegetarian entree, three or four sides and starches, grill items, and two soups which we added to their standard breakfast and salad options. These menus will be used for production when serving staff and guests of the hospital, but not patients. We built the menu using past sales data which led us to the most popular items: fried chicken, spaghetti with meat sauce, collard greens, macaroni and cheese and shrimp scampi with angel hair pasta. These were all put on the menu multiple times but most other items were used only once so we could keep a lot of variety available for repeat customers. We also had to factor in other dietary considerations such as providing a heart healthy option each day and we had to be careful of religious considerations as well so that we provided options for Halal and Kosher customers who don't eat pork or shellfish and for Catholic customers who don't eat meat on Fridays. In addition to writing the menu, we also calculated the nutrient analyses of the daily menus, and created menu signs with purchase prices.We also had to plan and implement a single-use theme meal menu. We chose to do a "Fall Festival" meal and planned our menu to include: chicken marsala, roast beef with gravy, butternut squash risotto, rosemary roasted fall vegetables (sweet potatoes, red potatoes, carrots and parsnips), mashed potatoes, collard greens, corn bread, hot apple cider and warm apple, pear, cranberry crisp. The mashed potatoes were supposed to be egg noodles, but the staff changed them up at the last minute because of some miscommunications, but everything worked out well anyway. Amanda and I were responsible for finding recipes for any item not included in their standardized recipes so we created the fall vegetable, risotto and crisp recipes from family-sized recipes and scaled them to make 100 servings. Once the recipes were scaled, the cooks sampled the recipes at 25 servings and then we made adjustments based on our taste tests to finalize the recipe ingredient amounts. All of the recipes were successful and have been added to the St. Agnes menu rotations. We were also responsible for creating menu signs and pricing our menu which led us to create a combo meal option for the day. We charged $5.50 for one entree, two sides and a 16 oz. fountain drink which provided a decent profit for the facility while allowing the patrons to get a good deal as well.
Donna making our butternut squash risotto in a tilt skillet. The picture below shows our crisp which was made by Ms. Laura, an 82-year old retired St. Agnes foodservice worker who comes back 2-3 days a week as a volunteer to make the best desserts ever (she sent us out the door with samples of her bread pudding earlier today)! The picture also shows the sign advertising the apple cider which we gave away for free in another area of the cafeteria.
Other things that we did:
FYI: I listed this rotation as #2 even though you haven't seen a post about any other rotations. That is because I started with a cardiac rotation that was 4 weeks long, but only completed 3 weeks prior to the start of our foodservice rotation. My intern partner and I have to return to the main hospital next week to finish cardiac.
- Shadowed a clinical dietitian to see how their charting and assessments work.
- Visited patient rooms with the patient nutrition representatives to see how they presented the daily menu items verbally and took meal orders. This is something that I will never do as a dietitian but it helped give me an understanding of how everything worked with patient feeding.
- Sampled test trays from the patient tray line.
- Sampled food in the cafeteria for quality, taste, texture and temperature standards.
- Conducted storeroom inventory.
- Shadowed a foodservice management dietitian.
- Checked out the pressure fryer (think pressure cooker but full of hot oil, seems pretty dangerous to me, but they've built in plenty of safety features) used by every Chick-fil-A which leads to the chicken being in the fryer less time.
- Placed bulk food orders to their food distributors.
- Toured the SYSCO distribution facility.
- Calculated daily late tray requests.
- Had daily lectures over foodservice topics such as food preparation, budgeting/accounting, management, HACCP procedures and much more.
