Some final notes from the Kitchen
.. and a call for more feedback so we can reference this document next year!

Hi, all!

Thanks again for all of your participation in the FC kitchen this year. I think it was a great success and I look forward to improving the facility even more next year!

For next years' reference:
- KITCHEN INVENTORY - WHAT WE HAVE IN STORAGE INCL FOOD (SPICES, ETC)
spreadsheets.google.com/pub

A personal note:
Because this is FC I'm gonna call myself out here on something - I think I did a good job of stewardship and I'm proud to have been of service. Thank you for all of your compliments, too. The thing I'm callin' myself out on is that I kind of needed that - I needed to be needed in order to feel ok. There were times that I chose to work when I didn't strictly need to, because I didn't quite know what to do with all my feelings. Thank you to those who recognized that and had patience. Thanks also to those who called me on it. I hope to show up next year with a lot more willingness to go out and embrace a freer, fuller experience of BM. I also hope to enlist a few more "kitchenatrixes" so that we can further distribute the workload :)

I'm gonna give you some of my feedback here:

- I thought communal Dinners worked great except we could have cooked more food. We knew we'd have about 100 in the camp and planned to feed about 60, counting on a 40% attrition rate. Turns out many more of us were hanging around the camp than any of us thought. Which was fabulous, but we were a bit short on food. I think next year we should plan on cooking for 75 - 80% of the people who are camping with FC.

- Oh, and we needed a dinner gong or an air horn or something - many people missed our meal calls!

- I thought the breakfasts worked well in the way we managed them. Except for umm, tuesday or wednesdays couscous *yum* we bought food communally and had the cooks prepare whatever was available. We did really well under the circumstances, and I am deeply grateful to all who bought food and cooked!

- Next year, I'd love to have a volunteer on board who is experienced with food buying/planning. I'd like that person to take on A) Planning breakfast meals and b) buying the breakfast food or organizing the buyers, citing SPECIFIC amounts to buy and c) organizing dinner cooks and bulk buying where possible.
Bonus points for figuring out how many veggies and vegans there are among us! If you're interested, let me know. I'll remind you next year ;)

- we needed to have a couple of kitchen orientations, so people know how to use the sinks and grills, and the garbage, and where to put things away.

- I think the job that I did could be broken up into three jobs - one food coordinator, and at least two Stewards - people who know where stuff goes and how to do the cleanup. I found myself doing a little more hands-on management than I was planning on doing (not really surprised about that! see above!) Again, if you're moved to create the Kitchen Awesomeness with me next year, message me.

Here are some comments we received in the comment book, feel free to add your own, I'll compile and keep a reference for next year's planning.

- Cooks please have a set time for dinner and breakfast (breakfast btw 9-10, dinner in the hour before sundown?)

- Kitchen volunteer meeting (orientation) Tues AM

- better garbage management incl (compost for burning)
CK note: we need to decide as a group if we can handle this for the whole community or if we can only manage this for communal meals. As it stands, people are using kitchen garbage (and water) and that's cool... if we have the volunteers at the end of the burn to manage it all. One solution is to simply shut down the garbages in between communal meals, and anyone using the kitchen for personal cooking can just pack out their garbage and water. Another is to manage it like the Evap pond, and have a communal garbage approach, but that's gonna take some volunteers!

- We needed someone on Coffee Duty for the AM shifts!
CK: John and I had a good idea - an outside table for morning coffee / tea making and service. The Barista Bar.

- Limit fried food for community meals.

- More vegan meals

- Dishes: Boil the cooler water if we're repurposing it for dishes, it can carry bacteria
- Also, bleach in the rinse water was suggested

- Prescot College has a part of their web site that does portion calculations that might be a good guideline for when people are buying food since buying food can be hard to calculate for so many people

- Cooler duty: The ice position was effectively expanded to include emptying the cooler water, repacking coolers with ice, and doing a sort-out and clean up of the food

- Grey water - we did well this year on the jugs - wow did we ever recycle a lot of plastic 2 gallon spout-jugs! Next year, think about bringing reusable containers, y'all! We could have also been collecting screw-top grey water containers throughout the week, and recycling unusable ones, that would have lessened the workload on the Sunday Cleanup crew.

- The kitchen should have been physically closed on Saturday afternoon - barricaded, or zip-tied closed. The additional clean-up for people who had used the kitchen after it was closed added one or two hours to our Sunday cleanup. Thanks to all of those people who came forward to do that work!

I have a couple more non-kitchen related items which I'll post under a different heading.

And now... your feedback? Any more to give us for reference next year? FYI I'm going to keep a separate tally of these here (docs.google.com/Doc for reference next year in case Tribe goes kaput for good!

lots of love and light

Cass