At any given moment at Casey House, the kitchen is alive and churning with activity. Here, the kitchen services team are working diligently each day to prepare hundreds of in-house cooked meals from scratch for our clients – a Herculean task for our team of five.
Prep work
Menu planning
Setting the menu is a great responsibility at Casey House. Each client has their own palates, preferences, culinary upbringings, allergies, dietary limitations, and other medical considerations to keep in mind at a hospital setting.
Outpatient and inpatient menus are the same for lunch, though inpatient clients also receive breakfast and dinner delivered to their rooms. Upon admission, our kitchen services team is notified about any dietary needs or restrictions. Oftentimes, these are multilayered, a client may be lactose intolerant and require a puree-only diet. Or perhaps they were prescribed a low sodium diet that’s gluten-free. It is a puzzle for our kitchen team to solve– how do they can adapt to the existing meal or create a substitute to accommodate each person?
Our kitchen supervisor Leonie prefers to select menus the traditional way – by asking clients and staff for their suggestions. In the serving line for lunch, she asks all the important questions: “What’s something you haven’t had in a while? What would you like to eat?” Listening to client feedback is crucial. For the nearly 300 people who dine with us each weekday, Leonie considers it 300 opportunities to make someone feel special through the options her team prepares– as though it was selected just for them.
Plus, there’s always room for dessert to be sprinkled onto the menu throughout the month. The team enjoys conceptualizing what treats would make someone’s day. While a nutritious entrée may be the main event, the pleasure of eating is also a valuable part of the lunch experience at Casey House.
Menu planning is often a collaborative process between clients and the kitchen staff, influenced by conversations in the serving line.
Ordering food
The volume of food ordered at Casey House has greatly increased over the past year. Deliveries are completed with a weekly schedule in mind, but oftentimes ingredients are used up before the next shipment arrives. When planning for lunch, the team orders around 300 units per item per day. For example, if today’s menu featured pork chops with steamed vegetables and rice, the team procures 300 pork chops, 300 scoops of vegetables, and 300 servings of rice. Furthermore, we offer two lunch options daily, which requires another 300 servings of a main protein as well. That’s just for one day out of the five-day week.
In addition to meal ingredients, clients can also grab fruits during lunch. After the transforming lunch changes were enacted, the kitchen team doubled their orders to 4-5 crates of oranges, bananas, and clementines each week. Oftentimes the demand for food is so high that they must order more near the end of the week to replenish the fruit.
Even with the manufacturer’s listed volumes on the packages, Leonie uses her expertise to gauge how much of the ingredient the team will actually need. She also considers client trends and the timing of the month to predict how many clients may come each day.
Morning
Inventory
Deliveries to our loading dock occur in the mornings. The kitchen staff hustle to transport everything inside, especially cold and frozen products. This can be especially challenging when external factors like traffic delay the arrival and sneak into prime cooking and serving time. An impressive amount of food can fit into the tight spaces of the storage areas. While the shipments are abundant, the team runs through the ingredients at such a high volume that available space fluctuates during the week. Formal inventory audits happen quarterly, but most of the recordkeeping comes from periodically checking the pantries and fridges to ensure that there are no ingredients being left unused.
Deliveries from the loading bay are quickly moved to the dry storage room, fridge, or freezer.
Prep
After breakfast has been delivered to inpatient clients, the work begins for the lunch service. This can span from washing, chopping, marinating, cooking, and even outdoor grilling during the summer months. All engines are pumping ahead of service time at noon.
Afternoon
Lunch service
By 11:30 a.m., the team is ready to start, hurriedly packing around one hundred perfectly portioned takeout meals for the lunch service volunteers to hand out to clients. Moreover, these volunteers assist to set up fruit and beverages at the takeout table. By noon, clients come to the servery where kitchen staff will plate their meal and interact with each one. For some, a simple food order suffices, and others elect to chat about their lives with the kitchen staff or provide a compliment. Time moves quickly during the lunch rush, with hundreds of meals being scooped, plated, and served in just two hours. The kitchen staff team go above and beyond to try their best to ensure that no one leaves hungry. By 1:30 p.m. the dust begins to settle, the inpatient lunches are delivered, and the final portions are packed to-go.
Outpatient meals are served on plates for dine-in or packed in containers for to-go. Inpatient meals are plated and delivered to their rooms.
Cleaning and handover
When the dining room closes for cleaning at 2 p.m. there is a moment of reprieve. The kitchen team begin to clean and prepare for a much lighter load of preparing the inpatient dinner service. This is also an opportunity to prepare for the following day as well
The kitchen services team at Casey House are a force to be reckoned with at our hospital. Not only do they feed clients, they provide nourishment in their own culinary language that speaks to the heart. Day after day, this reliable team beckons the hungry to come for a meal, be assured that they have a seat at the table, and a place to call home.
September 8, 2025
Behind the scenes in the Casey House kitchen
At any given moment at Casey House, the kitchen is alive and churning with activity. Here, the kitchen services team are working diligently each day to prepare hundreds of in-house cooked meals from scratch for our clients – a Herculean task for our team of five.
Prep work
Menu planning
Setting the menu is a great responsibility at Casey House. Each client has their own palates, preferences, culinary upbringings, allergies, dietary limitations, and other medical considerations to keep in mind at a hospital setting.
Outpatient and inpatient menus are the same for lunch, though inpatient clients also receive breakfast and dinner delivered to their rooms. Upon admission, our kitchen services team is notified about any dietary needs or restrictions. Oftentimes, these are multilayered, a client may be lactose intolerant and require a puree-only diet. Or perhaps they were prescribed a low sodium diet that’s gluten-free. It is a puzzle for our kitchen team to solve– how do they can adapt to the existing meal or create a substitute to accommodate each person?
Our kitchen supervisor Leonie prefers to select menus the traditional way – by asking clients and staff for their suggestions. In the serving line for lunch, she asks all the important questions: “What’s something you haven’t had in a while? What would you like to eat?” Listening to client feedback is crucial. For the nearly 300 people who dine with us each weekday, Leonie considers it 300 opportunities to make someone feel special through the options her team prepares– as though it was selected just for them.
Plus, there’s always room for dessert to be sprinkled onto the menu throughout the month. The team enjoys conceptualizing what treats would make someone’s day. While a nutritious entrée may be the main event, the pleasure of eating is also a valuable part of the lunch experience at Casey House.
Menu planning is often a collaborative process between clients and the kitchen staff, influenced by conversations in the serving line.
Ordering food
The volume of food ordered at Casey House has greatly increased over the past year. Deliveries are completed with a weekly schedule in mind, but oftentimes ingredients are used up before the next shipment arrives. When planning for lunch, the team orders around 300 units per item per day. For example, if today’s menu featured pork chops with steamed vegetables and rice, the team procures 300 pork chops, 300 scoops of vegetables, and 300 servings of rice. Furthermore, we offer two lunch options daily, which requires another 300 servings of a main protein as well. That’s just for one day out of the five-day week.
In addition to meal ingredients, clients can also grab fruits during lunch. After the transforming lunch changes were enacted, the kitchen team doubled their orders to 4-5 crates of oranges, bananas, and clementines each week. Oftentimes the demand for food is so high that they must order more near the end of the week to replenish the fruit.
Even with the manufacturer’s listed volumes on the packages, Leonie uses her expertise to gauge how much of the ingredient the team will actually need. She also considers client trends and the timing of the month to predict how many clients may come each day.
Morning
Inventory
Deliveries to our loading dock occur in the mornings. The kitchen staff hustle to transport everything inside, especially cold and frozen products. This can be especially challenging when external factors like traffic delay the arrival and sneak into prime cooking and serving time. An impressive amount of food can fit into the tight spaces of the storage areas. While the shipments are abundant, the team runs through the ingredients at such a high volume that available space fluctuates during the week. Formal inventory audits happen quarterly, but most of the recordkeeping comes from periodically checking the pantries and fridges to ensure that there are no ingredients being left unused.
Deliveries from the loading bay are quickly moved to the dry storage room, fridge, or freezer.
Prep
After breakfast has been delivered to inpatient clients, the work begins for the lunch service. This can span from washing, chopping, marinating, cooking, and even outdoor grilling during the summer months. All engines are pumping ahead of service time at noon.
Afternoon
Lunch service
By 11:30 a.m., the team is ready to start, hurriedly packing around one hundred perfectly portioned takeout meals for the lunch service volunteers to hand out to clients. Moreover, these volunteers assist to set up fruit and beverages at the takeout table. By noon, clients come to the servery where kitchen staff will plate their meal and interact with each one. For some, a simple food order suffices, and others elect to chat about their lives with the kitchen staff or provide a compliment. Time moves quickly during the lunch rush, with hundreds of meals being scooped, plated, and served in just two hours. The kitchen staff team go above and beyond to try their best to ensure that no one leaves hungry. By 1:30 p.m. the dust begins to settle, the inpatient lunches are delivered, and the final portions are packed to-go.
Outpatient meals are served on plates for dine-in or packed in containers for to-go. Inpatient meals are plated and delivered to their rooms.
Cleaning and handover
When the dining room closes for cleaning at 2 p.m. there is a moment of reprieve. The kitchen team begin to clean and prepare for a much lighter load of preparing the inpatient dinner service. This is also an opportunity to prepare for the following day as well
The kitchen services team at Casey House are a force to be reckoned with at our hospital. Not only do they feed clients, they provide nourishment in their own culinary language that speaks to the heart. Day after day, this reliable team beckons the hungry to come for a meal, be assured that they have a seat at the table, and a place to call home.
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