In a Mediterranean Mood

Tonight my soon-to-be-graduating class of Masters of Nutrition Science students put on a shindig for, get this, the preceptors for this year’s outgoing dietetic interns. It was a thank you dinner for the preceptors, put on by the interns, but the meal was planned and executed start-to-finish by my class as a project for Food Service Management.

It was gorgeous. I wish I had pictures of the venue and the food – I’ll try to get a hold of some from our FSM instructor. The theme was “Savoring the Mediterranean,” and in order to avoid having to make special meals for those with food intolerances we planned a gluten-free, dairy-free menu.

Let me just recount it for you here so that you can salivate over it:

Apps: Roasted red pepper and walnut pesto, hummus with preserved lemon, and olive tapenade, served with homemade sourdough bread and chickpea-rosemary GF crackers
Salad: Mixed greens with fig-shallot vinaigrette and edible flowers
Dinner: Quinoa cakes with basil and sun-dried tomatoes, served over braised greens and cannellini beans, all topped with sautéed oyster mushrooms
Dessert: Almond cream tartlet topped with fresh strawberries

If I’ve left anything off the list, I’ll certainly hear about it from my classmates.

We had a pretty great leadership team. They were bossy and got the job done! Theresa, who completed culinary school before she came to Bastyr and is a masterful vegetarian cook, was running the kitchen and the cooking crew, and Laine was in the “front of the house,” making the most of her natural leadership ability and vast experience working in restaurants.

Exuberant Wendy was in charge of us all, acting as mother hen and cheerleader. She also kept in touch with the interns and the internship director to make sure everything went smoothly. And Cheryl and her donations team raised $2000 in cash and in-kind donations to put the cherries on top of this dining experience.

And finally, let me put in a few good words for the grunts: the prep cooks, line cooks, fry cooks, pastry chefs, waitstaff, bartenders, and the decoration team. Oh, and the dishwashers! We did a great job!

The glitches were few, like when we ran out of beans-and-greens and had to whip up another batch, or when some of our tartlets collapsed into puddles of almondy deliciousness. No matter… the dinner guests knew nothing of our setbacks and had a fantastic time.

So congratulations to everyone for a job well done. If our exit exam was based on our performance tonight we would all graduate with honors!