Question
Sue Michaels
Can you suggest some resources for cooks working in senior facilities who need to serve balanced diets to those lacking teeth/won't wear dentures? Maybe some smoothie recipes & other soft balanced meals that can be served daily?
Answer
So I'm going to, uh, be a little transparent for a minute and say that, um, a relative of my family near the end of their life had to be on a puree diet. And one of the things that this family member, uh, it was my mother, she used to say, please make the food taste like the food. I know because sometimes we think, let's boil a carrot, let's boil a potato, let's put it in the blender and here's dinner. But the reality is that, pardon me, the reality is that people want to eat food that they know and flavors that they like. So that's the first thing. And the next thing is you can practically puree anything, uh, from vegetables that make beautiful soups, uh, from desserts. You can make puddings, you can make a cheesecake. A cheesecake is practically pureed when you think about it. You don't want to use a lot of sugar if you're making desserts or smoothies or whatever. And, um, I wanted to say something else to sue, uh, for those of you who have completed the hospital unit, the health unit. And then you have to find a hospital menu and review it and find the three categories of review from cardiovascular, gi, and diabetes. And one of the things that I always discuss with students is that when facilities like nursing homes or hospitals or whatever are planning their menus, they're also considering their bottom line. And they wanna look for menu items that have a good margin. Historically speaking, cheaper foods, those with lots of preservatives have a better margin for a facility. So getting that facility to move over to a more holistic or plant-based way of eating is where I always say a Rouxbe graduate can come in because why can't you become an intermediary, so to speak, and go to a nursing home or go to a senior center and say, hello, my name is Jane Doe. I have a certification from the Rouxbe Online Cooking School and I'm really familiar with and label what your expertise is. And I think that, and I also talk about this when I do review the hospital assignment, because I think that there may be many cooks and many chefs who know how to cook traditional hospital food. But adding that plant-based component is so important. And it's very interesting because when I finished my Rouxbe Education 10 years ago, I decided that I was going to volunteer at Meals on Wheels. And after my first day at Meals on Wheels, I thought that I was going to not explode, but it just made me feel very sad that everything was packed in styrofoam, everything was prepackaged, everything was salty, everything had oil. There wasn't a vegetable in sight. And I have to say that all of the home delivery systems through, through the world do wonderful, wonderful work in terms of identifying food insecurity. But I think that we need to step it up a bit. So I contacted a friend of mine who is also a Rouxbe grad, and I said, I have a great idea. I think let's go talk to the woman who's the director of this program. And we told them that we would bring all of the food and that we would make everything whole food plant-based, no oil. And uh, it was a very foreign concept for this woman to hear and all of the good work that she and her volunteers had done in the community. So maybe not everyone is ready to hear about whole food Plant-based, but I think that it's always good to plant a seed and, um, just make sure that if you are going to puree some food, it works best. Of course with a high speed blender, if you do not have a high speed blender after you puree the food in a conventional blender, it might be best to put it through a double mesh strainer so that the food in fact is free of any kind of residual or food fiber or whatever. So Sue, that was a great question and I think that we all have, uh, the wherewithal to make some changes along the way. And I really appreciated the question. It was very heartfelt. Thank you so much. And I did provide a website from Healthline that had some very good ideas, which you might like to use. I will say I did an exhaustive book search last night and, uh, it appears that there are many people who are experts in the field and their books got horrible reviews with one star. So I decided then to, uh, look for a periodical or a website like Healthline, and they had some really excellent ideas that you might like to look into.
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