Is there anybody more homesick than a first-year college student? Probably not-and that's at least part of the reason why so many college and university foodservice departments are preparing recipes solicited from incoming students' parents. They are the ultimate comfort foods.

"We're certainly not the first folks to do it, but we've been very successful with our new Recipes from Home program," says Dennis Pierce, director of dining services for the University of Connecticut, in Storrs. "The students love it, and it has also got us a lot of local press attention."

Last summer, postcards were sent out to the parents of all 2,000 freshman class members, asking them to submit recipes from home that their kids were especially fond of, in four different categories: salads, entrées, desserts, or vegan/vegetarian. "The response rate was surprising," says Pierce, "totaling several hundred submissions."

The next order of business for Pierce and his staff was to get to work evaluating and testing recipes that would fit operationally and be relatively easy to implement within the framework of the school's eight resident dining facilities. "We had to make sure the recipes would have the same flavor and performance when they're scaled up," notes Pierce.

The recipes with the most potential were then prepared for students selected at random, to find out which ones they wanted integrated into the four-week cycle menu. "We just grabbed some kids and brought them into the kitchen to get their reaction," explains Pierce. All told, 20 recipes were selected this year, and each dining room was charged with integrating their choice of four different items.

Recipes from Home P.O.S. materials were also created to promote the new menu specialties. "They say something like 'Tom Smith's mom's macaroni and cheese'," says Pierce. "The next phase will be to include a picture of Tom Smith's mom."

It was a great way to educate the public and parents on the dining services at UConn. At the beginning of the process, a press release went out to the local papers, and two weeks later, the story had appeared in 250 different outlets, including magazines, and radio and TV stations, thanks to an interview conducted by the Associated Press. (To up the public-relations ante even further, parents whose recipes were selected received three complimentary meal passes for the dining halls on campus.)

To keep the program relatively manageable, the postcards explaining and promoting the program were sent only to freshmen this year, although the school will begin including students' families from other classes in the coming years. Eventually, Pierce would like to publish a cookbook collecting all the recipes in one place.

Some of the new items have been so successful that they'll probably stay in the cycle, he adds. "One best-seller is Albanian Chicken Wings. It came from the father of one of our students and has nothing to do with Albania, but the name stuck."

Source: FoodService Director, March 15, 2007