A Year of Log Lunches with Hannah and Laura

Hannah Levin ‘16

 

Every Sunday, Hannah and Laura (we) met to plan the menu for the upcoming Log Lunch.  We got in touch with local farmers, namely Lisa MacDougall at Mighty Food Farm and Bill Stinson from Peace Valley Farm.  We got as much produce as we could from them, often building our menu around what they had available that week. We compiled the recipes and multiplied them to feed 100, then put together a shopping list. We hired a staff of roughly 12 students that we worked with every week.  Two of them went shopping on Thursday and picked up groceries from Price Chopper, as well as the produce from the local farms.  Most of the staff helped with the actual cooking aspect on Fridays, and three more of them stayed and cleaned the kitchen after Log Lunch was over.
Each Friday morning at 7, we were joined by two other cooks to begin the day’s work. We usually started at least one worker on the bread so that it would have time to rise before we had to bake it. The other workers would get started on the day’s chopping, which was no small task. There were days where someone would spend hours cutting onions in order to make french onion soup or zesting 50 lemons so we could make lemon bars for dessert. Despite the hard work (and many tears from cutting the onions), the kitchen environment was always a blast: there was singing, dancing and a few hilarious blender explosions that made Friday mornings some of the best few hours of the week.

Log Lunch

For the first part of this year, we were still holding Log Lunches in Dodd, while The Log was being renovated.  However, by early November, we were able to move into the new Log, which was of course very exciting! It was not without some adjustment, though, as Hops and Vines was running the new kitchen and cooking lunch and dinner there every day of the week except for Log Lunch Fridays.  We slowly ironed out the logistics so that we had access to the kitchen, storage for our groceries both in the walk-in refrigerator and in the main area of the kitchen, and we could rearrange the tables and chairs into the traditional Log Lunch Hogwarts-style set-up.  There were some minor hiccups, but overall the transition went smoothly, and it was so nice to be back where Log Lunch belongs.

 

We are proud of all the delicious food that was produced and wouldn’t change anything, except for the time we made WAY too much rice pudding and ended up giving it to a local farm to feed the pigs. All told, it was an exciting and rewarding year leading Log Lunch, which brings together such a wonderful community on campus.