24 hours in the life of June Ward

CLAIRE ALLISON

June Ward has been running the catering business Food for Thought in Dee St for the past 11 years.

I'M up by 4.30am, or I'm late. I'm through the shower, grab up the bits and pieces and the books and go. I'm down here by 5.30am at the latest to make a start on early orders which have to be out by 6.30am, 6.45am – sandwiches and rolls. Two of us do that.

Seven o'clock, some of the others come in, and then we start on scones, muffins, more sandwiches and more rolls. That's for taking around workplaces, and we've got some ongoing contracts with businesses.

By 8am we have six on deck here and another one comes in at 9am to do one of the contracts.

As the morning goes on we've got to have all the scones and muffins, sandwiches and rolls done, cakes have got to be cut and wrapped.

We do about 14 loaves of bread into sandwiches every day, about six to seven dozen scones, depending on orders, and about 100 cakes get wrapped every morning.

Everything is made from scratch – that's one thing we push here, no pre-mixes, no preservatives, no additives – it's baking like you'd do in your kitchen at home.

From 9am, we've got the girls going out with the baskets on runs around town – from the south of Timaru and out to Washdyke. They're out for anywhere from about an hour to 1 3/4 hours. Everything gets cleaned up before they go out.

Then we bake. We start all over again; the next round is basically doing cake baking for the next day, slices and stuff, so we can ice them later in the day.

If there are any lunch orders they get made and delivered at 12pm, or 1pm, or whatever they want, or there might be an order for lunch for 10 at a business, or something like that.

Then one of the girls goes down and does a lunch run in the middle of town, and comes back up North St, and there's another run southwards.

Gradually, everybody goes home, except for idiots (like me) who are still here. There's usually only two of us after 1pm. Once the baking is done, sometimes preparation gets done before the others go. Preparation's boiling eggs, making sandwich fillings, cutting up ingredients for savoury scones, that sort of thing.

There always seems to be dishes somewhere. We have three goes at them during the day. There are two of us on the afternoon tea contracts, so it's about 4.30pm by the time we finish up.

I could then have a 5pm function; organisations and businesses quite often have an afterwork meeting or function and want some nibbles for that.

And then there are the one-offs that can come out of the blue, and quite a lot come out of the blue in the morning, wanting something for the same evening. Most people usually book a week in advance or so. Bigger things like weddings or 80th birthdays or celebratory dinners could be booked up to a year ahead.

It's just a little bit easier if they have a wee think. But I have been guilty of that myself: I'm going to ring the salmon place in a minute and ask for $200 worth of salmon – for tomorrow.

After I've got the floor swept and washed, I go grocery shopping. Some of it's from wholesalers, some is at the supermarket. It's usually an hour, 1 1/2 hours at the supermarket every day. Then I bring it all back here, and put it away in fridges and freezers.

If there's a supper to be delivered, that could be anything up to about 10.30pm by the time you deliver, get back here, clean up.

Most evening things you can take the food and leave it, you don't have to serve, although occasionally you do. It could be 10pm, 11ish; most of them want their supper delivered about 10pm. Then I'm off home, and there's usually bookwork to do.

I quite like Coro Street, but it's very patchy. It's probably nearer 12am by the time I go to bed, although maybe it's because I'm getting slower ...

I'm a night owl, definitely a night owl. But I haven't always been a person who gets by on little sleep. Sometimes if I sit down to watch TV I'll fall asleep in my chair. I have no trouble sleeping.

Two afternoons a week from 4.30pm to 7.30pm I'm teaching piano in pupils' homes, and then I go to the supermarket after that. I've been doing that [teaching piano] for, let me see, nearly 40 years.

I had 68 pupils when I was doing it fulltime, from Makikihi to Cannington to town. I did it at schools and halls in the country areas, in the days when they'd let the kids out for lessons. Then the Education Board stopped it, and said after school and weekends were enough time.

So that was my main job, but a friend and I used to do a bit of catering way back, a few things here and there.

What do I do at weekends? Sleep! Here's hoping ... We still have a contract at the weekend, a seven-day-a-week one. I did have Christmas Day off, but that was the only day.

It's a different kind of catering at the weekends, most of them would probably be birthdays, weddings, dinners, that sort of thing. We've done an afternoon tea for two, and a family reunion for 500 – that's the biggest one I have tackled. It was a sit-down, two-course lunch in the old St Patricks Hall. That took a day or two to get over.

The afternoon tea was for a lady and her husband. She'd been in Christchurch for cancer treatment, and a friend of hers arranged for afternoon tea to be waiting there for them when they got home.

What do I like about it? Basically it's people. You have got to learn to laugh, and you've got to have quite a rapport with your clients. No matter what they think, they are always right. If you tell your clients they are wrong, you're not going to have many clients, full stop.

And most of them are really, really nice people, and the ones that are different make life interesting. If you are working with the public and if you don't like people, then you are out of luck.

Sometimes the little jobs can lead to the bigger jobs. Word of mouth is our best advertising. We tell clients that it's their choice – we are quite happy to work with their menus and their price, not our menus and our price. The hardest part is people saying, "What do you have?", and we say, "What do you want?"

The downer would have to be getting up at 4.30am. Over the years I've trained myself that when the alarm goes off, I get up. If you snooze or hesitate you've lost it.

I used to cook for myself. But half the time by the time I get home and it's 9pm, 10pm, and I'm not usually interested. Janet makes me two pieces of toast and a cup of water when I get into work, so that's taken care of, and we usually stop about 2pm, the two of us, and we'll have a sandwich.

Some days if I'm home at a reasonable hour, I will make a meal and I thoroughly enjoy it, and think I must do that more often.

I think now I look at food more how it's presented, rather than what it is. Before, I'd look at something and think, "Oh yum, that looks nice".

I played the organ for 28 years at church in Esk Valley, but over the last 10, I'd never know whether I was going to be there or not, so now I roll up at Easter and Christmas and the odd time in between.

I do a bit of knitting, occasionally. I used to do a lot, but not so much now.

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