BY RILEY WILSON
Sharla Miller remembers when her grandma used to attend the Senior Citizen Holiday Dinner and Theater in Eudora. Now, as director of food and nutrition services at the Eudora School District, she continues the program.
Each year, the School District provides Eudora seniors with a free meal and a sneak peek of the high school’s fall play. Miller said the dinner is a chance to give back to those who have always taken care of others.
“They’ve always been the ones to take care of all of us, and this is our one day of basically pampering them and taking care of them,” Miller said.
This year’s dinner is at 11:30 a.m. Nov. 14 at the Eudora High School Commons. Registration for the dinner is due by Thursday.
Miller said the food services department works for over a month to prepare, from predicting how much food will be needed, to ordering the food, to preparing and serving the meal.
Last year, over 200 guests attended and eight turkeys were cooked, Miller said. The turkeys are cooked by the high school culinary arts department, while the food services department prepares almost everything else, she said.
“It gets them used to preparing the food to that degree, to that volume,” Miller said. “When I graduated high school, I had no idea how to cook a turkey.”
Jack Low, Eudora High School culinary instructor and chef, said the purpose of the culinary classes are to provide students with real-life experience.
He said the culinary students cook for many events throughout the semester to give them the opportunity to learn customer service interactions.
“The goal is to get the kids who want to go into culinary better prepared for culinary school or the ones that are going into the career better prepared for the career itself,” Low said.
Students have already practiced putting rub, a mix of seasons and flavors on chickens in preparation for cooking the turkeys next week. Additionally, Low said the most important part of cooking a turkey is understanding the proper temperature for it to be cooked at to taste correctly.
With all the work that goes into preparing the turkeys, Low said this opportunity impacts the students.
“Being able to take ownership for something like that is, I think, huge,” Low said. “A sense of pride also. Being able to say our culinary group made it.”
Eudora resident Barb Keltner has had the opportunity to attend the dinner twice since she and her husband Mike moved here in 2017. She said the meal is something she knows a lot of people look forward to around the holiday.
Keltner said the dinner is a wonderful community event and tradition for the Eudora School District.
“The meal’s delicious, the play is wonderful, but just the community opportunity is the top thing,” Keltner said.
Call Miller by Thursday at 785-542-4987 or email her at sharlamiller@eudoraschools.org to register for the meal.
Reach reporter Riley Wilson at eudoratimes@gmail.com.
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