Charitable chefs
JJC culinary students cook hearty meals for needy
During October, members of Joliet Junior College's culinary arts program cooked and packaged 450 meals for Daybreak Shelter and MorningStar Mission, area groups that help the needy.
Everyone appeared to enjoy the food, right down to its "cutesy container," said Jackie Kinney, MorningStar volunteer coordinator.
"It's a different style of meal than they are used to having," Kinney said. "When you're feeding 200 people, it's just easier to put together a casserole. It's a nice hearty meal for our guests."
Although JJC usually hosts an October food drive in honor of the Chef and Child Foundation's Childhood Nutrition Day, chef Kyle Richardson wanted an extra project, something that developed his students' skills while they fed the hungry.
The next step was planning a menu. Richardson wanted something he could easily multiply for a crowd, something that would also reheat well. The final selections were Hunter's stew, rice pilaf, homemade rolls and cobbler (apple and cherry).
The stew gave the fabrication class plenty of practice cutting beef, pork and vegetables. The baking class provided the rolls and the cobbler, along with the opportunity to prepare strudel topping. Rice pilaf simply does not dry out in a warming oven the way pasta does.
Culinary arts student Jessica Chaplin, 20, found the experience more gratifying then a typical class project.
"It was amazing to be a small part of something that was much bigger," Chaplin said. "For some of our classes ... the public can enjoy a nice, cooked meal. But there's a difference between cooking for someone who likes it and someone who needs it. It's more than a meal. It's life."
And they had them. At Daybreak, kitchen coordinator Gail Flatness stretched that one dinner into three. She served the original dinner to 104 people on Saturday then made another complete meal by cooking additional items. On Tuesday, she used the leftover rice to serve with Greek chicken.
Flatness, a former restaurant owner, was happy and surprised to receive meals from culinary students training to be professionals.
"It was great that they wanted to give back," she said.
Twenty-five additional volunteers from other parts of the college -- four clubs, vocational students, alumni and faculty -- helped package the meals into individual aluminum containers for shelter volunteers to pick up on Friday. With so much help, this last piece of the assembly line took only an hour, Richardson said.
In addition, the college collected more than 600 pounds of nonperishable food to restock local food pantries. Next semester, Richardson hopes to intensify his efforts by having his students cook at a shelter's site. For today, he's stunned at the amount of work involved to provide a single meal for a shelter.
"I would love to be able to say we did something like that for two weeks instead of one night," Richardson said. "It just overwhelmed me to see how many people are in need right now. The people from the missions were very gracious and very thrilled with our efforts. It was an amazing thing to see the look on their faces."
