Home Cooking: Send in Your Recipes!

October 2, 2007

Special meals and theme dinners, like the Country Fair, help make dining hall eating fun

Feeding 1,000 teenagers every day is a challenge. First, there's the taste factor – those 1,000 palates don't always agree on what's delicious. Second, there's the sheer quantity of food needed. And then there's the reality of homesickness and memories of home cooking.

Exeter's dining services meets this challenge daily, with varied menus and special events designed to brighten up meals, and even provide a little of grandma's comforting fare. This year, Exeter's dining services is inviting families to send in favorite recipes as part of a new program, "Recipes from Home". These dishes will be served at a special dinner scheduled for November 29. If you'd like your student to taste that wonderful goulash again, send the chefs the details with the online recipe form. Melinda Leonard, general manager of dining services operations, says, "The recipes we've received so far for 'Recipes from Home' are great, and all are easily transferable to large quantities. We're hoping to get a lot more so that the 'Recipes from Home' event will be a great success."

"Everyone has a favorite dish that's linked to special memories," adds Ward Ganger, director of dining services. "We want to help rekindle those feelings as well as expose students to the cultural aspects of home-style cooking from all corners of the globe. To some students, the recipes may seem exotic. For others, it's normal everyday fare. No recipe is off-limits. If our team of chefs is challenged by your dish, we'll invite you to teach us how to prepare it, using the proper techniques of authentic cuisine from your region of the country or the world."

Home-style cooking isn't the only way to keep students happy. Often, it's the sweet things in life that do the trick, like pies and ice cream. Both are handmade in Exeter's bakery in plentiful quantity – 75 pies and 25 tubs of ice cream per week. As if by magic, those tubs of ice cream get gobbled up – in the dining hall, as ice cream sundaes and ice cream pies, and in the Grill as milkshakes.

Here are some special events cooked up by dining services for the remainder of the year:

Apple Fest on October 10 – apple pie, apple strudel, apple you-name-it to celebrate one of New England's tastiest crops.
Birthday Celebrations on October 16 and November 27 – a monthly celebration of birthdays, with decorated cakes and ice cream made by Exeter's own bakery.
Chef's Corner on October 17 – pond bass, caught and served by dining services staff.
Country Fair Night on October 26 – an evening of country music and downhome food.
Pumpkin Carving on October 31 – students carve pumpkins in the quad to celebrate Halloween.
Cereal Election on November 6 – using tried-and-true election principles, students vote on their favorite wake-up food.
Thanksgiving Feast on November 13 – turkey, pumpkin pie and all the trimmings.

The term rounds out in December with a holiday dinner and gingerbread decorating.

And, lest we forget how complex all of this is in practice, let's consider some of the quantities. For an average breakfast, PEA's own bakery makes 300 muffins. Each week, they produce on average 300 loaves of bread and 200 pizza dough balls. That's a whopping 8,400 pizzas per academic year! Looked at another way, that's enough pizza, placed side-by-side, to run the length of runway 4R-22L at John F. Kennedy International Airport. You begin to get the idea…

Interested in learning more?

Send us a recipe for November's "Recipes from Home" dinner…

Check out the week's menus to see healthy, varied choices of entrees and desserts, including a vegetarian choice for every meal…

Read about last year's Country Fair Night…