Jay Sharkey (in the white shirt) dives in for the Polar Bear Plunge!

The Polar Bear Plunge holds 26 events across the state of Michigan.  All proceeds from the events go to support Michigan’s Special Olympics athletes.  In 2011, nearly $735,000 was raised by more than 3,000 plungers statewide; since 2008, the events have raised $1.4 million!

This year’s Polar Bear Plunge in Holland raised $9,015!  Congratulations to all the participants, and a special thank-you to Jay and Ben for supporting this great cause!

"Qui per totam vitam discit per totam vitam crescit: In lifelong learning lies lifelong growth."

Creative University’s first upcoming course is a Product Emphasis & Brand Extension Seminar on Feb. 7 & 8 in Chicago.  This seminar, sponsored in part by Fontanini, Superior Foods, Basic American & Maple Leaf Bakery, will explore new products and techniques to keep our brand and food offerings fresh.

Another great event is the Gordon Food Service 2012 Food Show.  The GFS Food Show offers the opportunity to browse new products and attend seminars with a variety of topics.  It’s one of the best places to explore current food trends, pick up tips & tricks for food and business management, and learn about what’s going on in the food industry.

Since 2003, Creative University has had thousands of participants in a huge variety of courses.  Here are just a few examples of our course offerings:

• Culinary Boot Camp
• Principles in Leadership
• ServSafe Certification Training
• Social Media Marketing
• Turbo Chef Training
• Understanding Customer Expectations
• Vegan Food Seminar

“Our students really got behind this project,” said Chuck Melchiori, Vice President of Business Development, Creative Dining Services. “Our goal for each of the colleges was to consume 6,400 bowls, and we exceeded that goal.”

The three local colleges snap, crackled and popped their way to 228 cases of cereal, which were delivered in part to Kids’ Food Basket in Grand Rapids on January 11, 2012. Kids’ Food Basket fights childhood hunger in greater Grand Rapids. The nonprofit began over nine years ago by serving 125 kids each school day through their Sack Supper program and now serves over 4,700 kids every school day, plus thousands more at local sides through the summer.

Melchiori was pleased to have a role in helping to stock the agency’s food pantry. “it’s good for our students to support the community through this type of program.”

Author: Laurie Stears, Marketing & Promotions Specialist

Workers at Kid's Food Basket sorting donations.

College Students bringing the donation to Kid's Food Basket.

Unpacking the donated cereal.

Some of the cereal donated to Kid's Food Basket.

Chuck Melchiori and Laurie Stears of Creative Dining Services signing the cooler at Kid's Food Basket. It is tradition at Kid's Food Basket for donors to sign the cooler.

• Champions the Creative Dining Services corporate philosophy and core values.
• Willingness to assist others.
• Demonstrates superior leadership. (Superior Performance Award)
• Promotes professional growth and development in themselves and their staff.  (Superior Performance Award)
• Shows initiative, enthusiasm and a positive attitude. (Award of Excellence)
• Demonstrates excellence in service and performance. (Award of Excellence)

This year’s recipients of the Superior Performance Award are: David Seweryn, Food Service Director of Trinity International University and Sandy Harmon, General Manager of the Haworth Center. The Award of Excellence for 2011 goes to Dan Zantello, employee of the South Haven Conference Center and Rosie Scheumann, employee of Indiana Tech. Congratulations to all of this year’s recipients.

In a year filled with terrifying natural disasters, awful scandals, and an economy that seems to stubbornly refuse to bounce back, it’s more important than ever to pause and reflect on the meaning of the season. If, like us here at Creative Dining, you follow the Christian tradition, you know this season, this day, is about love and sacrifice and the beginning of the most incredible redemptive act ever. Even if you are not Christian, the history of this day and this season brings to mind the love of family and friends, and how this is so much more important that all the cards, cookies and presents we worry about and go crazy over.

So, from all of us at Creative Dining Services, we wish you a very Merry Christmas!

I officially began working at Cook Servery and the adjacent Haworth Inn and Conference Center in 2006, during the summer in which I turned 16.  I started out doing back-of-the-house duties during catered events.  Another girl and I shuffled awkwardly in place, too shy to speak much, just waiting for the dishes to start coming back so we could scrape the uneaten food into the garbage (composting hadn’t quite caught on yet) and stack the dishes on carts to bring to the dishroom.  We were so young that we could only work a few hours at a time and had to be punched out before 10:00pm.  But it was my first real job, and I loved it.  I loved the hustle and bustle of the kitchen as the chefs plated up delicious meals that were arranged just so on the clean white plates.  I loved the banter between the catering staff.  I loved the challenge of clearing trays as quickly as possibly and neatly stacking the dishes to maximize cart space.

Fast forward to 2011.  I’m nearly halfway done with my senior year at Hope College and my sixth year of working at CDS.  Chefs, managers, and student workers have come and gone.  I’ve done just about everything, from catering serving to working almost every station in the dining hall (deli, salad bar, hostess, etc).  I am also the current Marketing & Promotions intern at the CDS home office.  Working at CDS has given me years of invaluable experience.  I feel truly blessed to have grown up with such a great company!

-Katelyn Hemmeke, CDS Marketing & Promotions Intern

Many people are under the false assumption that eating healthy is more expensive than eating take-out/fast food. On Wednesday, October 26, Calvin College’s Catering Manager, Steve McBride, and Executive Chef, Ian Ramirez, proved this notion wrong with a “Healthy Habits” presentation to the faculty and staff.

They discussed many healthy eating topics such as the Food Matters program, and how this fit in with Grow, our sustainability initiative.  Their presentation involved using biodegradable products, how to properly read nutrition facts, and the $20 Challenge. An example of the $20 Challenge included a KFC meal (for four people) for $19.61 or a healthy meal from the grocery store which included: chicken, lean ground beef, potatoes, corn, peas, yogurt, oats and milk for only $19.54. To further validate the $20 Challenge, Chef Ian took the challenge himself and cooked a healthy meal for the audience – fifty people for $45!

One of Chef Ian's desserts from the 2010 January Series dinners

On Tuesday, October 18, Calvin College’s Executive Chef Ian Ramirez participated in an event called Pecha Kucha at Stella’s restaurant located in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Pecha Kucha (which means “Chit Chat” in Japanese) is an event focused on creative people sharing creative ideas; it brings the local, creative community together from different fields to network and showcase their ideas.  The participants only have 400 seconds to present; they must prepare 20 slides and only have 20 seconds to discuss each slide.

This particular Pecha Kucha event included a wide variety of topics such as astronomy, juggling, meditation and Chef Ian’s topic: 45 Dishes in 15 Days. Chef Ian presented the challenges and rewards of designing 45 creative and delicious dishes for Executives during the January Series at Calvin College. He discussed the importance of knowing exactly whom you are cooking for. Demographics play such a large role when it comes to designing a dish…especially when it comes to designing 45 Dishes in 15 days!

Over thirty recipes were submitted, all of which incorporated Fontina’s new Tempo sauces.  These nine new sauces include delicious flavors such as Kentucky Bourbon, Parmesan Garlic, and Honey Chipotle.  All of the recipes will be compiled in a book and distributed to CDS accounts for all of our clients to enjoy!

The top three prizewinners each received a Best Buy gift card.  Cargill will feature the winning recipe at the GFS food show this spring.  The winning chefs and recipes were:

3^rd place – Ben Mokma of Hope College/Haworth Inn and Conference Center – Asian Ginger Glazed Salmon Sliders

2^nd place – Ian Ramirez of Calvin College – Chicken Bulgogi Yakitori

1^st place – Tom Hoover of Hope College – Pork Churrasco with Maque Choux

Check out Tom’s winning recipe, followed by photos of the top three dishes:

Pork Churrasco

Serves 6

Vegetable oil – 1 C

Smoked Paprika – 2 T

Fontina Sweet Habanero Sauce – 5 T

Garlic, minced – 2 T

Rosemary – 2 T

Thyme – 2 T

Salt – 2 T

Black pepper – 2 t

Pork tenderloin, trimmed – 2 lbs

1. Combine oil and smoked paprika in a small pan.  Cook over medium heat for 5 min.  Whisk occasionally.  Cool to room temperature.
2. Pour oil infusion into blender.  Add garlic, thyme, rosemary, habanero sauce, salt, and pepper.  Blend until herbs are minced fine.  Reserve.
3. Cut each tenderloin into 2” thick medallions.  Flatten each between sheets of plastic wrap to ¼” thickness.
4. Place cutlets in a shallow pan and cover with the marinade, making sure to coat the cutlets completely.  Chill covered for 6 to 8 hours.
5. Pre-heat a broiler, gas grill or salamander.  Scrape off most of the marinade from the cutlets.
6. Grill cutlets until just cooked through, about 2 minutes per side.
7. Brush each side with a small amount of sweet habanero sauce.  Serve immediately.

Maque Choux

Serves 6

Butter – 2 T

Red onion, diced fine – 1 C

Red bell pepper, diced fine – ½ C

Corn, fresh-cut from cob – 2 C

Heavy cream – ¾ C

Thyme – 1 t

Fontina Honey Chipotle Sauce – 3 T

Green onion, chopped fine – 1 stalk

Parsley, chopped fine – 1 T

Basil, chopped fine – 1 T

Salt and pepper to taste

Tabasco sauce to taste

1. Melt butter in a non-stick skillet over medium heat.  Add onion and sauté until translucent, about 5 minutes.
2. Add bell pepper and sauté for 3 minutes.
3. Add corn and sauté for 2 minutes.
4. Add cream, thyme, and honey chipotle sauce.  Simmer until the sauce thickens.
5. Mix in green onion, parsley and basil.
6. Add salt, pepper, and Tabasco to taste.  Serve immediately.

Pork Churrasco with Maque Choux

Chicken Bulgogi Yakitori

Asian Ginger Glazed Salmon Sliders

Congratulations to Ben, Ian, and Tom!  We look forward to seeing (and eating!) all of the contestants’ recipes in the kitchens of CDS accounts everywhere!

When people think of what it would be like to cater a presidential visit, most think of what a special honor that would be (which is quite true) and how challenging it would be with the security, logistics, food and all the pressure the event would bring (which is also true).  However, what people might not know is that a presidential visit is but one event in a day full of events requiring the attention of the gifted and extremely skilled group of culinary professionals at Hope College Dining.

To begin, here is how the week of the President’s visit stacked up.  On Monday, the week started off with a booking for a funeral cater.  The booking, which was for 350 people, came in for the coming Wednesday.  But let’s back up the bus a minute.  Before the weekend, the call came into the catering department that President Obama was coming into town later in the week (Thursday) to visit a factory that builds batteries for electric cars. This factory is owned by our biggest corporate catering client, Johnson Controls, Incorporated (JCI). We were charged with providing the catering services for the President’s visit on behalf of our client, JCI.  Of course, an event like this called for all hands on deck and for making preparations immediately.  For me, as the chef in charge of catering, that meant having a cold and a hot menu ready to go with no idea of the number of people nor if any food would be needed at all. I also had the first of countless meetings with anyone and everyone who might be involved in this undertaking.  One of the first meetings was a brainstorming session with my catering partner-in-crime Tim Blackburn, the catering department manager and Todd Guyer, our production manager.  The first thing on the agenda was to compose labor for the upcoming week. We had to make educated guesses on a lot of it because not a lot of our bookings had firmed up yet.  Sometimes plans don’t gel until a few days before or even later. Catering requires a lot of quick-footedness and flexibility. There’s also an unwritten law of catering: once one huge VIP booking comes in, the floodgates typically open and EVERY possible VIP client wants something on that very same date.  This is exactly what happened.  The initial funeral for Wednesday was the first domino that started the whole cascade of events for the remainder of the week.

So on Wednesday we had a funeral booked whose number of guests attending was likely to rise from the initial 350. The deceased was popular and known by many folks in the area. The food was going to be buffet service at a church across town with cold carved turkey sandwiches and several salad selections; we would provide china and silver amongst other amenities.  Johnson Controls, host of the President’s visit, was also expecting a group of advanced design people from Europe in for a week of meetings, which meant high-end catering with close attention to the quality details and lots of TLC.  And then the real fun began on Tuesday.  In came a booking for 100 box lunches for every morning until the next Saturday.  Next, the number for the funeral doubled to 600 the afternoon before the service, which was to take place at lunchtime the next day. Then, we got a call from an on-campus department.  They wanted a picnic for 150. On the same morning as the President’s visit. “Absolutely!” we said before hanging up the phone and scurrying back to our offices and kitchens to figure out just how we were going to pull this off. And make no mistake – we WERE going to make all of this happen.  It was a matter of grace under pressure, and just how graceful we’d be was going to be determined by how well we planned. We have a love/hate relationship with being busy – we love the business coming in, but then there’s the work part that’s not so fun.  So we had more impromptu meetings, dozens of phone calls, lots of scribbling on notepads and tapping on keyboards.  Through the weekend and into the beginning of the week more bookings came in. By the time Tuesday rolled around, the catering order sheets for Thursday alone were about an inch thick on the clipboard.   Did I mention that wedged in among all of this was a visit from the President of the United States? Oh yeah, there was that too.

The Secret Service and the Presidential Advance Preparation team came in over the weekend and they also used our catering services.  Nice people – simple needs, easy to please.  Tim spent about 6 hours total with them going over the site of the President’s visit and planning out every detail with the team.  Although the President would only be at the facility for a few hours, everything had to be set and ready to go well ahead of time.  We were told that the food, tables, chairs, decorations, staff, everything had to be loaded in before 8 am; after that, no one would be allowed to leave until sometime after the President had left. The President was due to arrive around 1 pm.  In essence, Tim and the staff working the party would be locked in for most of the day.

For my part, the menu became fairly straightforward. There was a list of 300 invited guests which would not change, so it was easy to figure out how much food to plan for.   It was decided early on that hot food wouldn’t be needed, so that took all of those logistical problems off the table.  Per the First Lady’s directive, the lunch buffet needed to be light and healthy yet substantial.  There needed to be 2 or 3 grazing stations for people to come and go with ease.  My own thoughts were that there needed to be as many local, Michigan-based products as possible out on the tables.  The final version of the menu went like this:

Caprese Salad

Fresh Michigan berry selection

Waldorf Turkey Salad wraps

Roasted Corn Salsa with Homemade chips

Gourmet cheeses

Macaroons

Banket

Krakeling

The last two items are culinary representatives of the Dutch heritage here in Holland.  Both are dessert items: Banket is a light pastry filled with almond paste and baked golden brown; Krakeling is a figure-eight shaped cookie made with sugar, butter and flour and prepared in such a way as to result in a light cookie with a cracker-like consistency.  The only hitch came with the wraps: they were supposed to be filled with chicken Waldorf, but there was a supply problem with the select chicken we wanted to use, so we turned to turkey.  Of course, this happened about 12 hours before we had to have the sandwiches done and ready to travel to the venue.  Twelve hours may seem like a lot of time, but it’s really not that much when the product you need hasn’t been found and ordered yet. It all ended well as the turkey we used was very high quality and had the added benefit of being a local product.  Ironically, the turkey came from farms once owned by our funeral client, who was a local pioneer of large-scale poultry farming.

With the food planned out and ordered and the production staff at the ready, the tough part began with the planning for how to get everything else to the venue, including staff.   It was decided we could do the event with 6 people, which pleased the Secret Service – they had encouraged us not to have too many workers buzzing around at the site.  This number was also good because of the other catering events requiring staff for that day.  The chairs, tables and tents were delivered from a rental company the day before so when our presidential catering crew arrived they could immediately start setting things up and making the space look beautiful.  Or as beautiful as a factory can be, that is.

The Big Day comes.  Thursday is barely news as I’m walking to work in the pre-dawn darkness.  It’s just me and the silent streets.  It’s very peaceful in the pre-dawn hours and I tell myself I should do this more often, but I know that’s not gonna happen.  My solitude is interrupted by some random guy on a bike sailing out of nowhere.  He’s towing a Burly bike trailer with who-knows-what inside. It looks like a jumble of junk or garbage.  The guy’s a mobile hoarder.  He brakes a little right before he passes me on the sidewalk and the screech of his brakes makes me jump.  The Zen of my walk is ruined.  I tramp the rest of the way to the kitchen as I hear the Bike Hoarder riding around in the near distance, the now-faint sound of his screeching brakes allowing me to locate him as he aimlessly circles the neighborhood.

I get to work and the place is humming with activity.  It’s 5 am and the President’s food is being assembled and arranged on platters ready for transport across town to the venue. The pantry crew were already going full bore.  I look over the various trays for the presidential event, pitching in here or there before turning my attention to the morning’s other catered events.   The catering crew going out to the factory has to be there by 7 with everything they need, and be locked in by 9. It comes down the grapevine that President Obama is running a little late and now isn’t set to arrive until 2, but this is the way things go for the Leader of the Free World these days – there are so many things on the docket that being on time becomes a struggle. The catering truck is soon loaded and on its way. Everything is on schedule and going smoothly.

When the catering crew arrives at the venue, Tim sends me a text message that everything’s going fine – nothing was forgotten.  He says there is security everywhere.  Soon there is no more communication from the venue.  Secret Service has blocked all cell phone and internet traffic for the duration.  While my small bit for the President is done, I still have plenty to do this morning.  I help Jay, my sous chef, prepare the picnic for 150 hungry maintenance staffers.  Because of the heat and threat of rain they decide to have the picnic inside, which makes things much easier.  I help Jay get things set up, and then I go focus on breakfast and lunch for the Johnson Controls design group.  Today their meeting is Italian-themed, so I make a spinach and tomato frittata with red pepper hollandaise for breakfast and a rustic baked chicken dish called Santori with a side of chanterelle mushroom risotto for lunch.  The food goes out and I spend the rest of the morning and lunch putting together an order and getting some prep lists done for my sous, who’ll spend the next day chopping and slicing product for a wedding coming up on Saturday.

Soon I’m home and basking in the glow of a job done well for the President and all the rest of the clients that day.  We receive lots of compliments on the service, food, etc.  Tim and his presidential service crew are ecstatic and excited.  I give myself a brief pat on the back, a celebratory glass of sweet tea and end up falling asleep while watching episode 37 of Mad Men.  In this business there is very little resting on the laurels.  The next day brings on the next client’s event and another day of challenges to be met, guests to feed and hopefully, more compliments to accept.  The week is capped off with a Saturday wedding reception for 300 people.  It’s a simple affair.  The groom is a former employee who wanted a barbeque.  So it’s a picnic menu set up at Windmill Island, one of our most beautiful catering venues.  The party is pretty laid-back with the guests wandering around the beautiful gardens on the island eating barbeque, drinking micro-brewed beer and admiring the “De Zwann” windmill from which the island received its name.  De Zwann was imported from the Netherlands as a gift to the city and I was part of the team there to cater its re-dedication years ago after it had been painstakingly re-fitted for actual use as a working grist mill.  But that’s another catering story….

-Tom Hoover, Chef Manager, Hope College