Turkey day came almost a week early in the Joseph High School cafeteria, as new food service manager Ann Dundas orchestrated her first holiday feast in the school.

“I’m planning for 400 people,” Dundas said last Thursday, the day before parents and community members were invited to join students and staff for the special lunch.

On most days, Dundas and her only assistant, Linda Farless, serve about 200 students and staff members, so doubling the food output required extra effort.

However, trays of little individual pumpkin and apple pies were already baked and 16 ten-pound turkey roasts were cooked, sliced and ready to heat. The rest of the week there had been relatively light cooking menu days to allow time for Friday’s community holiday meal. It is a Thanksgiving tradition for the Joseph School District, one Dundas is happy to carry on.

Joseph’s new food service manager brings 13 years of experience to the job. The mother of four grown children, she was a stay-at-home mother until her youngest was in second grade and she went to work as a substitute assistant cook in the Ashland School District. Within two years she had been promoted to a cafeteria manager, a position she held at several different elementary schools in Ashland, serving from 150 to 350 students a day.

“I always loved to cook,” she said about the transition to home kitchen to school cafeteria. “You just have to do it in huge quantities and in a tight time frame. I like it that at the end of the day it’s all cleaned up and you can go home.”

Dundas and her husband, John, a building contractor, “semi-retired” and moved about three years ago to Joseph, where her mother, the late Jaci Linn, had lived for 17 years. “We decided we wanted an adventure,” she said of the move.

They ended up buying the BLT store on Main Street in Joseph, their first venture into a retail business. John Dundas is enjoying himself minding the store these days, according to his wife, while she cooks for Joseph’s children.

Dundas succeeded Tom Swanson of Wallowa, who is now the cook at Wallowa River House, as cafeteria manager this fall.

She has worked to improve school lunches with her own touches, such as substituting fresh-chopped romaine lettuce and spinach in place of bagged salads.

“It’s more work, but Ann does a lot and it’s worth it, because the kids like it better,” said Farless, who has worked in the Joseph school kitchen for a dozen years, as she prepared Thursday’s green salad.

Lunches also include home-made bread and, once a week, homemade desserts.

One of Dundas’ challenges is preparing menus and lunches that fulfill governmental nutrition guidelines, which change every year. As they serve lunches, she and Farless visually gauge students’ trays every day to make sure they carry away – and hopefully eat – the required variety of foods.

Many of Joseph lunch menus include recipes that Dundas originally served in her home kitchen, and modified for school. She also will occasionally test a new recipe, preparing a relatively small amount of a casserole, for example, and have students taste it. Among her favorite personal recipes among the children are chicken enchiladas, lasagna and chocolate winter cookies, topped with powdered sugar.

Dundas said that there is surprisingly little waste. “Kids are better eaters here than they are in Ashland. They like real food, and eat more fruits and vegetables,” she said.

In addition to lunch for up to 200 students and staff members daily, Dundas also prepares and packs a quick but nutritious breakfast for all kindergarten through fourth grade students every day through the Breakfast in the Classroom program, and serves breakfast to about 30 in the cafeteria.

Dundas has clean-up help daily in the form of teams fifth and sixth graders who come in to wash dishes, a volunteer project started last year to avoid using Styrofoam when a dishwashing position was cut from the budget.

Last Friday the two-woman staff of Joseph’s cafeteria had the satisfaction of seeing their extra work pay off, as parents and grandparents joined their children in enjoying turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, dressing, dinner rolls, green beans and pumpkin pie.

They even had extra help, as school board members worked the serving line during the meal.

Many favorable reviews could be heard at the decorated tables around the cafeteria, summed up in one word by a third grader, who was asked about his opinion of the food: “Good!”