Catering Class Becomes A Job
Written by Jessica Becker, Former Student on Friday, January 23, 2015
Have you ever had a passion for cooking? Start taking cooking classes at school! You can start in basic foods and nutrition classes and work your way up through advanced culinary arts and into a catering class.
Here at Snohomish High School, Linsey Haywood teaches many foods classes. Her most advanced class would be her catering foods class. In this class they make mass amounts of different foods including desserts that they take to different events in the community outside of school.
Haywood talks about how she actually hadn’t even planned on being a foods and nutrition teacher, she first tried elementary education in college and realized that was not for her. Then she was told she could specialize in Family and Consumer Sciences Education. She said she loved cooking classes in high school and it sounded fun so that’s how she got to where she is today.
Before becoming the foods teacher, Haywood had no passion for cooking, and was more interested in interior design, health, and contemporary living. However, now that she teaches food classes almost all day long.
“I can’t imagine doing anything else. I thrive in the fast pace lab environment and have developed more of a love for cooking,” she said.
The catering class begins by Haywood soliciting various organizations, staff, sports teams, etc. About their catering needs for February through June. After she has found events she begins filling their calendars, she plans what the class does based on the events they will be catering. She then plans advanced labs that they will complete. They create a lot of desserts because most take a lot of technical skill. The students also make frozen dinners every other week that they sell to staff members.
The students are required to complete five hours of out of class time catering. This could be simply serving to actually preparing the meal in the classroom several hours prior to the actual event. Haywood herself and the students are not directly paid to cater events.
“We do charge people who want events catered. Our standard charge is the price of groceries plus 20 percent. Sometimes it’s less depending on the client’s budget. The money is put into a sub account under FFCLA in ASB. We use the money to buy catering supplies and take a field trip to a downtown Seattle restaurant at the end of the semester.”
The most important event they cater each year I through the Snohomish Education Foundation. They auction off a ten person dinner every year to raise money for the foundation that we cater. They do a very high end meal that costs a lot of money and special ordering of food. At the dinner they will have ten guests and ten student servers. The students are trained prior to the event on how to serve and they all do each course in unison.
The experience is 12+ hours of exhausting work, but she says, “it is so rewarding for myself and the kids.” In one event they have fed about 400 people.
This year they plan to be doing something similar as they will be serving eight people at the Mayor’s house.
