Q. What’s a typical day like for the DOE’s top chef?
A. I start my day by meeting with my staff. We’ll discuss the main issues that we’re dealing with and how we can prioritize. This week, for instance, we finalized all the menus for December (they’ve already gone out), and we’ve started to work on January’s menu. One of my staff members is responsible for writing the menus, and we’ll sit down together and discuss what food we want to highlight and what initiatives we want to push for each month. So, a large portion of my day has to do with timelines—I guess everyone has those.
Q. You didn’t say that your day starts with breakfast. Do you eat breakfast?
A. Good point. My staff knows that it’s probably not a great idea to start talking to me until I’ve had my whole grain cereal with skim milk and a couple of bananas. I’m very much one of those folks that needs to eat. If I don’t eat and I’m hungry, I can get a little cranky. So, yes, definitely, my day starts with breakfast. There’s no doubt about that. Then we start to get into it. And like I said, it could be any number of themes.
My office is responsible for all the menus for the City, the product procurement, product testing, and recipe development. We’re also, to a large degree, responsible for training kitchen staff. We have a chef for every borough. All of what they do, day in and day out, is train kitchen staff. It’s a big system, and there are always new products that people need to understand how to use. We are trying to move the system more and more toward a scratch cooking scenario, so we’re continuing to train folks in how to prepare and present food. Some of it is very, very basic.
We also have a chef who is our point person for local procurement and garden café initiatives—taking the product from a neighborhood community garden and working with community members to involve the product in school menus.