Brunch, grab a muffin. Passing periods, grab a cookie. Lunch, grab a salad. A typical PHS meal has switched from from store-bought to cooked in-house at the Piper Cafe.

“When I first moved in here, we made almost nothing,” Chef M’Lisa Kelley said, stirring a skillet of rice for the day’s grilled chicken burrito bowls. “Now, the only thing we bring in as an outside source is Holly’s Mandarin and pizza. The muffins, everything is made in-house, in the morning — even the croutons.”

Since she arrived to fill the vacant position left by Chef Aaron Sears two years ago, Kelley has helped build a new menu from scratch. This year is the first that muffins are made in house.

“We started working on our muffin formulas last Christmas,” Kelley said. “We started with the chocolate muffin because I wanted the perception to be as delicious as the Otis chocolate muffin that is ingrained and everyone loves so much.”

Despite her efforts, the new muffin is not as loved as the previous Otis version.

“It’s much more dry and crumbly than the old one,” senior Graham Dean said. “I think they should go back to last year’s chocolate muffin.”

However, the switch to the in-house muffins is more complex than a simple substitution.

“Starting two years ago, all the bread products and pastry products had to be half whole-grain and the federal government changed it for health reasons,” Kelley said.

Poor communication led to a shortage of compliant food products, Kelley said.

“For a lot of food service people this it was a shock,” Kelley said. “As of last July, all bread products, all pastry products, all pastas have to be whole grain, and this is the kind of things you have to work with.”

Senior Derek Cheung, who has worked as a food service TA for two years, also noticed the shift.

“The cookies have changed dramatically,” Cheung said. “Different company and less fat. We got a lot of complaints over the chocolate chip not tasting the same.”

Kelley herself expressed dissatisfaction with the whole grain products that were being served, but sees it as an opportunity to improve the menu.

“We’ve made most of the changes that we wanted to do,” Kelley said. “The one thing I would like to continue to pursue is to make our own cookies, make our own dough, come up with our own formulas and then produce those. The whole grain cookies we have to serve now are not very delicious. That’s possibly our next big project.”

The Piper Café menu changes constantly, and Kelley remains open to suggestions for new items and improvements.