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| (Photo: Kyle Miller/Wyoming IHC) |
The crew is done with the Little Book Cliff Fire. It was a good fire to do a test run of our logistical planning.
There was a push for crews to be more self sufficient this year with food. There are few things more important on a hotshot crew than good nutritious food. Besides helping recovery and fueling crew members through strenuous days, good food is tied to high moral and attitude. These are things we knew when we started the planning process in late March.
An aspect we had maybe forgot about though and are starting to see the benefits of, is the social part of cooking and sharing meals. With strong team cohesion being one of the most important traits of the most successful teams around the world, cooking together is another good way to strengthen the team’s cohesion.
With limited time, efficiency in everything has been the number one priority for all designs and plans. We took an enclosed trailer and built it into a small cook shack where we can do our food prep while having to get as little out as possible.
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| (A major time saver for prep is the 3 qt. food chopper which is bungeed in the upper left corner of this photo. As far as time goes, it might be the most important tool we have. The cabinets latch to the ceiling, so they can be left open and out of the way of the cooks.) |
Meal planning and shopping efficiency for 20 people for several days was going to be another logistical hurdle. To deal with it we have an excel sheet where meals are selected on one page and an organized shopping list with the combined ingredients for all meals are generated.
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| (You just select how many times you want to eat a certain meal by putting a number in. In this case it was one of each of these meals. Then the next tab over generates the shopping list for the meals for 20 people. It's still an evolving menu but this is the current state of it.) |
There’s also a bulk item list we can check quantities of items we might already have on hand before purchasing more. The Excel sheet is stored in a personal Onedrive account and is shared between crew members who will do the shopping. With the Onedrive and Excel apps cellphones work as shared shopping lists between a couple of shoppers. The last important piece is a hard copy cookbook along with a meal planner, so the cooks know which meals to cook and what quantities of ingredients they’re allowed to use.
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| (This page is the shopping list that comes up on our cellphones. Meats are first, followed by veggies, dairy etc. There's a bulk item list to check to see if we already have the ingredients on hand and in sufficient quantities. If we were shopping for a different number of people the "# of People" box can be changed to adjust quantities accordingly.) |
Thanks to Kyle Miller for sharing the crew's story through story and pictures and the members of the Wyoming IHC for their initiative and innovation during a crisis. No product endorsement is intended. All thoughts are those of the author.
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