BY GINNY RAUE
Picture this - after a long day of work, away from your house or at home, you walk into your kitchen and say, “The last thing I feel like doing is cooking.” Now imagine that on this day, and every week day, September through June, you spent your work hours preparing and cleaning up after lunch for 632 kids.
Amazingly enough, Jean Wacha does just that and still doesn’t mind making a home-cooked meal every day for her family.
Wacha, 48, is the cook/manager at Macopin School in West Milford. She’s worked in township school caféterias for the last 17 years, starting as a substitute and working her way up, one mound of mashed potatoes after another.
“I still enjoy my job. Like most people, some days more than others,” she said with a smile.
Born and raised in West Milford, Wacha graduated from West Milford High School in 1984. Her father passed away while she was a sophomore and upon graduation she immediately went to work, finding employment in a factory.
Now a Warwick resident, Wacha and her husband, Steve, have two adult children. She was a stay-at-home mom for a few years then began her career in the caféterias of the town’s schools.
Besides preparing meals, Wacha is responsible for all the paper work involved with running the kitchen, inventory and ordering the food through district personnel, who in turn order from Pomptonian Food Services.
Her day starts early, understandably so. Including Wacha, there are just four workers in the caféteria where there were nine at one time.
“I walk in the door at 6:15 a.m. and I immediately start,” she said. She does all the cooking, with some help on board after nine o’clock. Once the cooking is done, she circulates and works wherever she’s needed.
Because of cut backs the caféterias have sustained, all food is now served on recyclable materials, but there are still plenty of pots and pans to be washed by the staff.
With so many students to feed there are bound to be picky eaters and favorite foods.
“All the kids want French fries,” she said.
Choosing fries over mashed potatoes and vegetables may be the norm, at least until high school when the girls start trending toward slimming salads. Middle-schoolers seem to have an aversion to brown-bagging it and some will just buy a bag of chips and a bottle of water.
While steps have been taken to provide nutritious school lunches, you can, as the old saying goes, lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
“We offer more whole wheat bread, fruits and vegetables but not everybody takes that. I can’t tell them you have to have healthier foods,” Wacha said.
School lunches cost $2.75 per day and Wacha likes to add in “specials,” such as an omelet or waffle day once a month. This year they’ll be test- running a barbeque day and possibly a brick oven pizza lunch.
Stormy weather and snow days can create havoc but the Macopin kitchen fared well this season.
“This year we had to move our ordering days but you always make sure you have what you need in the winter time,” she said.
When Wacha hangs up her apron for the day, she likes to read and swim and walk and hunt with her husband.
“I grew up hunting, so its second nature to me,” she said, and as a result you’ll find her freezer filled with venison rather than store-bought beef. There’s a selection of venison roasts, chopped meat, hot dogs and sausages ready to be cooked up at the Wacha house.
She likes to create her home menus on Sundays and then shop accordingly, sticking to the list and thereby avoiding waste. Seventeen years of caféteria training seems to have rubbed off, resulting in careful planning and spending.
She has a crock pot that works overtime, mostly because she enjoys going home after a long day to a house filled with tempting cooking aromas.
When her daughter was home on a college break recently, they had a crock pot soup-a-thon; 25 days of homemade soups. Not all were winners, but some will be welcomed as re-runs.
It seems that cooking for her family would be a snap after looking at 600 hungry faces each day. It’s assumed that her family doesn’t have to stand on line with a tray to get their dinners.
Wacha sent in a favorite chicken recipe.