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A passion for making great food
It’s 5:30 a.m. and the kitchen staff at the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention’s (DAJD) Juvenile Division are hard at work preparing breakfast for the youth in detention. It will be a continental breakfast, with scrambled eggs, pastries, yogurt, and an assortment of other healthy food, served at 7:45 a.m. The cooks and bakers then start making lunch, which will be ready to go by 11:30 a.m. and may include burgers or variety of hot burritos and sandwiches. A dinner with a protein choice and vegetables comes at 5 p.m. with snacks offered at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. It’s a full day in the kitchen making sure all the youths in DAJD’s care have enough nutritious food to eat throughout the day.
“All the cooks and bakers take pride in what they make for the kids,” said Daniel Wohlfarth, one of the Juvenile Division’s kitchen team members. “It’s great working here. Each of the cooks and bakers get to provide input into what we make for the kids. We can each add a personal touch, create a new idea to try, or use a familiar recipe. As a cook, it’s wonderful that we can utilize our creativity to make nutritional meals for the kids.”
All the food prepared for the juveniles must meet the child nutritional food guidelines associated with the school lunch program. The Juvenile Division is fortunate to have a group of knowledgeable and talented cooks and bakers – between them all, there is well over 100 years of kitchen experience, which comes from around the world.
The team of cooks/bakers in the Juvenile Division includes:
- Daniel Wohlfarth, who is from the Seattle area.
- Diosdado Dato, who is from the Philippines.
- Luc Ta, who is from Vietnam.
- Joe Gorham, who is from The Bronx.
- Guru Sigdel, who is from Nepal.
- Diana Mullin, another local who recently joined from KCCF.
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