Beyond the Lunch Table: Inside Peck’s Kitchen

For more than 20 years, I worked in corporate dining, cooking for large groups of adults. So when I came to Peck nine years ago, feeding kids was a bit of a change.

It’s also what makes this job so much fun.

Kids are honest. If they love something, they’ll tell you. And if they don’t? They’ll usually tell you that, too.

Today, I work alongside a four-person dining team that keeps a lot moving behind the scenes—from preparing meals and homemade soups to managing the salad and deli bars, delivering snacks around campus, setting up Family Dining, and getting everything ready to do it all again the next day.

If you walk into Peck’s Dining Hall at lunchtime, you see the finished product: trays of food headed to tables, students from different grades sitting down with teachers and classmates, and a room full of conversation and community.

But let me tell you about all the things you don’t see: the locally sourced ingredients and meals made from scratch, the optionality of healthy and allergy-free choices, the preparation of a five-person team, waste reduction, and community responsibility.

Made From Scratch, Made to Explore

Of course, there are meals we know Peck students love—Monday pasta, pizza Fridays, breakfast for lunch, tacos, and grilled cheese. But if we only served familiar favorites, we’d be missing an opportunity.

One of my favorite parts of this job is introducing students to foods they might not normally try. We receive recipes and guidelines when it comes to our menu from FLIK Independent School Dining, but I have the freedom to adjust them for our community—whether that means accommodating allergies, adding in local ingredients, or creating something entirely new.

A lot of that food starts from scratch right here in our kitchen. We prepare our entrées, dressings, soups, sauces, and even vegetable stock in-house, giving us more control over the ingredients we serve. We source locally and seasonally when possible, and sometimes ingredients come from as close as the garden outside our Dining Hall, where fresh herbs and produce can make their way directly into a meal.

Throughout the year, we incorporate dishes from different cultures, often tied to holidays and heritage months. For Hispanic Heritage Month, for example, we served an Argentinian-inspired meal with grilled flank steak, chimichurri, roasted vegetables, and potatoes.

We want students to enjoy the foods they already love, but we also want the Dining Hall to be a place where they experience new flavors, ingredients, and cultures. Sometimes all it takes is putting something unfamiliar on the table and saying, “Give it a try.”
 

Allergens, Vegetarian Options, and Healthy Choices

For families navigating food allergies, what happens behind the kitchen doors matters just as much as what appears on the menu.

Peck has a nut-free kitchen, and I take that seriously. If an ingredient comes into our kitchen containing peanuts or tree nuts, it goes back. If a recipe calls for them, I change the recipe. But being thoughtful about ingredients and considerate of the students goes much further than nuts.

We also pay close attention to the breads and other products we purchase, including whether they are produced in facilities that handle allergens such as sesame.
That same attention goes into the snacks we serve throughout the school day. I review the ingredients in the prepackaged snacks we order and avoid products with artificial dyes, while also looking for options with fewer preservatives whenever possible.

We want students to have plenty of choices, too. A vegetarian entrée is prepared every day—sometimes something as simple as a familiar favorite and other times a dish like quinoa-stuffed peppers or barbecue cauliflower steak. We also maintain a designated section of the salad bar with simple fresh fruits and vegetables without ingredients such as soy or cheese.

Even dessert is about balance. Portions are kept small—generally no more than three ounces—and twice a week, fresh fruit takes the place of a traditional dessert.

Most importantly, students are taught to use the available resources to navigate through the Dining Hall. Menu boards on the wall and at each table identify ingredients and allergens, and before lunch begins, an adult reviews the day's menu and allergens with the entire Dining Hall. Over time, students become increasingly knowledgeable about what they can eat and the choices that work best for them.

That's part of what we're trying to build. We want students to enjoy their food, try new things, and also begin developing the awareness to make informed choices for themselves.
 

Feeding Peck Without Wasting Food

When you’re preparing food for an entire school, predicting exactly how much students will eat isn't always easy.

So we try to be thoughtful about what happens to food that hasn't been served.

If we have plain cooked pasta remaining, for example, we might turn it into a pasta salad the following day. Extra corn from corn-on-the-cob might become part of a soup. Vegetable trimmings can become stock.

And when we have appropriate prepared food that we can't use, we work with Share My Meals, a New Jersey nonprofit that rescues surplus meals and distributes them within local communities.

We freeze eligible surplus food, and Share My Meals generally collects from us once a week. Instead of that food becoming waste, it has an opportunity to become someone else's meal.

It Takes a Team

There are five of us on the dining team, and everyone plays an important role in keeping the campus fed each day. We are the first to arrive on campus at 6 a.m. to prepare for a full day of feeding students, faculty, and staff.

Vincent Perez is our Sous Chef and soup expert, preparing the soups that rotate through our daily menus. Hector Gallego oversees the soup and salad bars, keeping them stocked, organized, and at the proper temperatures throughout service. Dilma Martinez keeps our common spaces supplied with daily fruit and snacks and also handles food and coffee for events across campus. Gemay Loaiza prepares the Dining Hall, setting tables with plates, utensils, pitchers, and fresh water before each lunch period.

With 43 tables with 9 placements for our family style dining at each to set across two lunch blocks—not to mention hundreds of meals to prepare and serve—it takes all five of us working together. Everyone has their responsibilities, but no one is limited to a single job. When something needs to get done, we jump in and help each other.

That teamwork is what makes it possible to welcome the Lower School, reset the entire Dining Hall, and then do it all again for Upper School.

Without this team, none of the wonderful things we do would be possible!

Want to see what a day at Peck looks like beyond the Dining Hall? Explore student life at Peck or schedule a visit to experience our community for yourself.