413th Fighter Group Chow Hall

Members of the 413th 

The Chef isn't the Oscar of the Waldorf... but we think He's mighty good.

Did you ever work in the base chow hall?  I sure had my time in NATTC Memphis.  At first I was peeling potatoes.  We peeled two thousand pounds of potatoes every night.  It was just me and another guy.  We spent all night putting the potatoes in an automatic peeler.  After we took them out of the peeler, we put them in a wash bath and then cut the eyes out.  Then, because the cooks were taking early secures, the time that you get off, we had to slice the potatoes and then fry everyone of them.  The cooks were at home already, so we had to serve raw potatoes to the soldiers in the line.  I knew that they were raw because I didn't know what I was doing as a cook. 

Back to the peeling.  Many times we would look at the clock and then at the pile of potatoes in the bin and realize that there was no way that we would be able to peel and eye all of these in the allotted time.  So we would just leave them in the peeler a little longer.  Here's the way it worked.  When we put the potato in, it was a huge potato.  When we peeled it long enough to peel most of the eyes away, we ended up with a little tiny round potato.  Most of the potato went down the drain.  My brother is eleven years older than me and when I told him about this, he started laughing because that's exactly what he and his friends did when they were in the Air Force.  C. Jeff Dyrek, Webmaster.