Kitchen, Pantry, and Commissary

grafitti done by the previous cook
I think her naming of the kitchen shows a total lack of creativity.

I have a decent little kitchen at Camp Steiner; it's pretty well stocked with pans, utensils and serving dishes.  I took up a lot of my own spices, my two favorite knives and my mortar and pestle.  I have two ovens—one big enough to fit four large cookie sheets (half-sheet-cake size) and a smaller one that will fit two of those same pans.  There's a four-burner stove above the smaller oven, and a flat grill over the big oven.  I have three big, deep sinks and the hot water gets hot enough to burn your hand if you don't remember to turn on the cold along with it.

Rachel is standing next to my range so you have an idea of the size of it.
My work-table is in front of the ovens.

There's no electricity up at camp, so all of my equipment runs on propane.  At first I was having trouble with the big oven, but now it's working fine.  I have one little hanging light in the middle of the kitchen that works with three mantles like the ones in those old Coleman lanterns.  It doesn't give off much light.  I get up around 5:30 to 6:00 every morning to start breakfast; since the kitchen window and door face east-ish I get a little bit of light in through them in the morning, but when it's time to work on dinner the kitchen is getting pretty dark.  I can still see in there, but not well enough to be cooking.  Stephen remedied this by stringing up some work lights and leaving a gasoline generator and a heavy-duty extension cord outside my kitchen door; now I start the generator when it's dark and plug in my lights, and voila! It's lovely in there.

Jamie, Steiny, and Alex help with clean-up by lights from the generator.

I have five tiny propane refrigerators in my work space (four in the kitchen and one in the pantry). I can put a half-sheet-cake size pan into the fridges, but if I do I can't close the doors.  This is kind of a problem when I'm making food for fifty-ish people (I've never gotten an exact head-count of the people I cook for).
Two of the kitchen refrigerators work fine—except for they freeze all vegetables; but they are great for everything else. The pantry fridge keeps vegges just fine.  I use the other two refrigerators as big coolers to thaw stuff out or to keep things like margarine and butter; they don't make things cold, but they keep cold things cool enough (like your chest cooler that you'd take camping, only bigger). The fridges work well enough, I suppose, as long as I never put anything hot in them.  I did that once and instead of cooling the hot stuff, the fridge itself got warm.

Ryan is standing next to one of my refrigerators
so you have an idea of the size of it.

Every day I have to record the temperatures of my refrigerators and freezers.  This is kind of pointless because, for example, I'll look into one freezer and the thermometer says -10 degrees but I can also see that it did not freeze the tray of ice cubes that has been in it all night long.  The refrigerator might say 20 degrees, but nothing in it is frozen.  There's something not quite right with this picture.

My pantry holds a chest freezer, one of my five refrigerators (the one that works the best), and has shelves along the two long walls.  I guess (without measuring) that I have a total of 24-feet long, by 2-feet deep, by 8-feet high worth of shelves.  I have to keep everything from toilet paper to our extra dishes and utensils (disposable) to our non-refrigerated food on these shelves. (I'd estimate that at least 120 cubic feet of my shelf space is filled just with cookies and Little Debbie snacks!)

into the dining hall, taken from the kitchen

When I first signed on as cook I thought I'd get to plan the menus and shopping lists for our camp.  Not so.  The menu is already planned and I get whatever Commissary sends me.  Most of the food is pre-prepared, and I just heat it up.  It's like eating at Denny's every day. :-/   Now that I know what they are sending me each week, I'm trying to figure out how to re-make it into something that's actually yummy.

There is no phone at Steiner so even though Commissary is only 26 miles away from us (at the camps at East Fork of the Bear) there is no communication between me and them.  This is a HUGE problem for me.  See, at East Fork of the Bear they have a storage area that's about as big as our whole lodge (kitchen, bathroom, pantry and dining-hall).  Their storage place has walk-in refrigerators and freezers (they have electricity) and lots of shelves to hold tons of food.  That's because they actually feed everyone who shows up to their camps—staff and scout troops alike, and they order the food for us, too.

So every Monday, Wednesday and Friday they bring a truckload of food to my back door and dump it on me.  I am probably the only person in the world who would get upset at having a big shipment of food brought to me three times a week but, yeah, it does frustrate me.

Occasionally (rarely) Commissary will forget to send me something that I need. Like when we were supposed to have chicken-patty sandwiches for lunch and they sent buns, tomatoes, lettuce, and a gallon of mayonnaise, but no chicken patties.  Of course I didn't realize this until an hour before lunch time, so I had to get creative.  But the biggest problem stems from the lack of communication between the commissary and me.

Here's what happens:  Our menu says that I should serve apples, oranges and bananas with every meal.  So Commissary very kindly sends me an entire case of apples, a case of oranges and a case of bananas every other day.  I do serve the fruit with every meal, but you know that saying about leading a horse to water?  I can't make them eat three pieces of fruit with breakfast, lunch and dinner every day!  And that's just the fruit.

If I have green beans on the menu, they send me two number 10 cans of green beans; well I already have seven #10 cans of green beans on my shelves and the kids don't like them that much.  They send us a 10-pound bag of salad mix for each time we're supposed to have salad (ten pounds of salad four times a week?); I get one or two 5-pound containers of sour cream in almost every shipment, ten pounds of baby carrots and two to four heads of celery every-other-day, three gallons of mayonnaise and two gallons of mustard in two weeks . . . 
We just don't eat that much, and I don't have the space to keep it!  I can't tell them what we need, or how much we actually eat, except for in notes that I send with the delivery drivers. I've tried sending stuff back with them, but the drivers don't like that.  On my last shipment the delivery man flat-out refused to take anything back, even though I still had two unopened cases of apples sitting in plain sight.

This isn't just a problem for me, I think it's a problem for the camp because Stephen never gets to see or handle the money for the food stuff.  It just works like some kind of balance-transfer thing; Steiner gets charged for all the food we "eat" whether we really use it or not, just because it's delivered to us.  And I bet they'll use this year's food budget to figure out next year's budget. This means money that could go to fixing up the camp, or to programs is being wasted on our ridiculous food budget.

Now if I could have things my own way we would eat better (real, tasty food), we'd have more variety in our diet, and I know I could stay within the budget (I do know the grand-total food budget); I'd probably save them money.  And I'd keep an inventory of what's left at the end of the season so someone would have an idea what to bring up at the start of the next year. And I wouldn't leave things like sugar and mustard-packets in cardboard boxes during our closed part of the year for little critters to chew up and nest in.  (Well, I'll take care of that anyway.)

They ring this bell five times to call everyone for meals—
—you can hear it throughout the entire camp. 
If you really want to irritate the cook, ring the bell early.

For now I struggle along with too much food in too little space, and I do my best to take what they give me and make it into something better.  (When I do this everyone is amazed at what a great cook I am.  Just imagine what they'd think if I really got to cook! ;-) )