Last time I talked about my internship, I wasn’t enjoying it too much.

I’m pleased to say that I am liking it again. I’ve said it before but Foodservice is not my thing, but I’m glad I’ve had such a good experience thus far.

If you’re just tuning into my blog, in short, I’m a Dietetic Intern and am currently completing my 8 week Foodservice Management rotation, and I have only 2 weeks left! If you’re interested to know more about my journey through Dietetics, I talk about it here.

Anyway, I started out loving it… basically my preceptor is awesome. She has a very similar personality to me and is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to management. I’m lucky to have been placed in such a large hospital too because the opportunities to learn are endless. But I was getting a little restless and bored toward the mid-point because, like I said, Foodservice is not my thing.

We have a list of required tasks that we are to complete before our rotation is over, and I wanted to combine a few of them so I had bigger projects and not just busy-work. In order to kill two, well I guess three birds with one stone I combined event planning, menu creation and nutritional analysis. It ended up being a really fun project for me. Here’s the outcome…

We were asked to cater a breakfast for the Broward Heart Walk, which is a 5k run/walk put on by the American Heart Association in order to raise awareness of cardiovascular disease and raise funds for research. This breakfast was specifically for the Executives (read: CEOs and CFOs) from different hospitals throughout Broward County (the county where Ft Laud is located). Meaning it was a fancy-schmancy ordeal.

The first half of the event was a meeting in which the CEO of our hospital spoke, followed by one of our Clinical Dietitians and a cardiovascular disease survivor who had undergone quadruple-bypass surgery in our hospital just this past summer. My favorite part? They all mentioned MODERATION numerous times! My favorite word.

The second half was the breakfast. In collaboration with my preceptor (the Director of Food and Nutrition), we planned the event details such as how many tables and what linens we were using. The menu was my part though. I searched for recipes, made them “heart-healthy” and added my own twists, gave them to our Executive Chef to test, and planned the menu from that.

Along with planning the menu, I made “heart-healthy” recipe cards, which included some of the items that we served at the breakfast. We sent them off to Marketing to make them all pretty. The recipe cards also included the nutritional analysis per serving, following the American Heart Association’s Heart Check Nutritional Guidelines.

Since we had an omelet station, I knew people would be gathering around the buffet table with a little bit of time while they waited for their omelet. I figured it would be fun to add a little touch by placing “Did you know” facts around the buffet table.

I had many people come up to me and compliment the creativity.

Afterwards, naturally there were leftovers so we sat down for a late breakfast. I loved everything, especially the frittata and sweet potatoes. I’m so glad it went off without a hitch.

If there’s one thing I learned from this, it’s that I really love creating menus and recipes. That’s the foodie in me coming out though, so I guess I wasn’t entirely surprised by that. Now that this event is over though, my Management rotation will start winding down and I’m almost sad to see it go… almost being the key word ;)

Do you like planning events? What about recipes??