Gold medals fueled by home-cooking!
Colorado high school students in the ProStart culinary education program are helping to feed the world’s best ski racers during the 2015 FIS Alpine Ski World Championships at Beaver Creek. Photo courtesy Erica Ewald.
By Summit Voice
FRISCO — Hundreds of the world’s best skiers are in Colorado for the 2015 World Alpine Ski Championships at Vail and Beaver Creek, and handful of students involved with Summit High School’s culinary arts program are part of the action, helping to feed the need for speed.
For the past few days, six SHS students were part of a huge team of volunteer cooks, helping to prepare meals for racers and functionaries, starting with an early 4:30 a.m. wake-up call for breakfast duty. The Summit High contingent is part of the Colorado ProStart program, which has more than 100,000 students enrolled throughout the US. Only 34 students from eight Colorado schools were aked to participate in the World Championship event.
“We got lucky getting one of the spots,” said second-year Summit High teacher Erica Ewald. “The FIS Ski Championship has never paired with an organization like ProStart before, so this is a huge honor, said Ewald, explaining that she was notified of the choice in September. The six students from Summit High are Jack Anderson, Emily Gervais, Sierra Altman, Wolf Edberg, Nathan Quandt and Dylan Berwyn.
Ewald said preparations included preparing sample menus and working on basic kitchen skills, including knife skills and teamwork. As the event started in early February, the plan was for the young summit cooks to help feed race teams from Albania, New Zealand and Liechtenstein, preparing everything from quiches and European breads to full-on dinners, including pasta, sausages and soup.
“A lot of the menus have kind of a Mediterranean flair, and we can also put our own twist on them,” she said. “Initially we had to submit sample menus to ProStart for use at the FIS event but in order to keep some consistency with all of the groups they decided to have the Olympic Council put together the recipes we will be using to ensure they are adequate for athletes,” she said.
A little later this spring, some of the same students will be competing against at least 18 other teams in the ProStart Invitational (March 20) at Johnson & Wales University. The winners of that event will go on to represent Colorado in the national contest, April 19-21 in Baltimore.
