As Thanksgiving season approaches, fall-flavored desserts are filling stores everywhere, and Lambert’s culinary program is eager to jump on the trend with their November pie sales. Throughout November the culinary classes will be hard at work baking pies for the Lambert community, filling the school with the spirit of fall and values of Thanksgiving.
Pie sales are a unique once a year event, and with over ten different kinds of cheesecakes, bundt cakes and pies, there’s a treat for every customer. But not only are the pie sales a delicious addition to every person’s Thanksgiving table, they are also an essential part of supporting Lambert’s culinary program.
“All of the proceeds from the pie sales go directly back into the culinary program to help us buy food or equipment or whatever it is that we need for the year,” Chef Guerrasio, the manager of the culinary program, explained.
Running the culinary program is an expensive process, with food supplies and the electrical cost of all the appliances totalling to thousands of dollars per year. The November pie sales are the culinary program’s largest fundraiser and help keep the program running without charging students a fee for the class.
The success of the pie sales ensures that the culinary students are working with high quality foods, which also helps produce the best menu items for the Giddy-Up Grill, a cooking service for teachers entirely done by the advanced culinary students.
A big part of the culinary pathway is preparing students for a real life kitchen environment, which can be partly replicated through cooking in the culinary lab’s professional kitchen. However, it is harder to gain practical experience with serving food to an actual audience, which is why programs like the pie sales are so important for the students. The intro and advanced students are responsible for making all the pies, and end up making around 350 pies a month. The pie sales help students hone in on their knife skills, time management and scaling recipes to larger quantities.
“Pie sales is the one time of the year where my students are serving the general public and cooking high volumes of food,” Chef Guerrasio stated.
The process of mass producing pies is a great real world experience for culinary students to have, by helping them prepare better for a job in the culinary field.
Not only are the pie sales a great opportunity to support the culinary program and eat autumnal treats, the event has also brought together people from all spheres of the Lambert community and beyond. Madison Barley, a teacher for Lambert’s Food and Nutrition pathway and an avid pie sale participant, comments on how the pie sales have grown connections between people.
“It creates connections with surrounding communities,” Barley noted. “Because there’s a lot of people who don’t have a correlation to Lambert who have bought pies from us for years. It connects what we’re doing at our school to different communities, plus teachers and students within the building too.”
The pie sales have united teachers, students and people outside of Lambert, all through the purpose of enjoying good food and helping support a local program. Buying pies allows people to express their generosity through donating to the culinary program, embodying the spirit and festivity of Thanksgiving. And through participating in this exchange, teachers and students who never crossed paths before get to form new connections, creating a greater sense of community at Lambert.
