School Lunch-- A Follow-Up

Happy Friday, everybody!

We've been cooking up a storm lately, and soon enough I will certainly post a recipe or two. Unfortunately, I think Iain's camera has most of the pictures on it, and he's at work, so I don't have any pretty pictures for you guys.

There are two days of school left before summer vacation, which means two more public school lunches for my kids, plus whatever they get at summer school for those who are attending. Then change is gonna come!!

http://www.wcco.com/video/?id=79373@wcco.dayport.com

Whole wheat pasta and rice, from-scratch soups and hummus and dip, plain or reduced-sugar chocolate milk, grilled instead of fried chicken!! Yay! I don't know what exactly provided the impetus for this. Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, Michelle Obama's anti-obesity work, general awakening regarding the importance of good food? Probably all of the above are contributing factors. All I know is that next year will see some very grumpy kids angry about their chicken nuggets being removed from the menu, but hopefully after an initial shock period they'll come to enjoy the new options.

Also, waste management is set to improve dramatically next year! I'm not sure if this applies to the whole district, but my particular school has switched from styrafoam to cardboard lunch trays. Next year, they'll begin to recycle the trays and compost the leftover food, or donate it to a pig farm.

At any rate, I just wanted to update my rant with this excellent news.

Also, in celebration of wholesome school lunches, have a wholesome cookie recipe. I made these up a couple weeks ago because I wanted to see if I could make a cookie without white sugar or chocolate or other weird things. They were really good!

Wholesome (but perhaps not healthy) Cookies
Ingredients

• 6 TBS butter, softened
• 1/4 c. natural peanut butter
• 2/3 c. brown sugar
• 1 TBS honey
  
• 1 egg
• drizzle vanilla extract (probably 1/2 tsp.)
• 1 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
• dash salt
• dash cinnamon
  
• about 2/3 cup oats
• about 1/3 cup raisins

Procedure

• Preheat the oven to 350°F
• Cream the butter, brown sugar, and peanut butter together until nice and fluffy
• Stir in the egg, honey, and vanilla extract
• Stir in the baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and flours until well blended
• Add the oats and raisins (optional--feel free to sub in other dried fruit)
• Drop cookies onto a baking sheet and bake for about 10 minutes, watching to make sure they don't burn. The cookies should feel relatively firm on the top, and if pressed shouldn't indent very far.
  
• Let cool on a wire rack and eat warm or at room temperature.
  

School Lunch

I (Emily) have a commentary on Minneapolis public school lunches for your reading pleasure. No recipes here. Well, maybe I'll stick one in later; we'll see.

Every day at work, I spend half an hour as a lunch lady. No, I don't have to wear a hair net. I do, however, pass out condiments, keep the kids quiet(ish), and wipe off the table after the teachers come for their students.

Now, my school does some things right. Rather than handing each child a tray with an entree, vegetable, roll, and milk, the students get to choose their own food. They are encouraged (but not forced) to take one of 3-4 entree choices, a roll, a milk (plain, chocolate, or strawberry), and two fruits or vegetables. Every day, one entree is vegetarian, and students can opt for a hot meal or a sandwich, salad, or wrap. Rolls are whole wheat, and the milk is low-fat (1%, I think). Vegetables and fruits are usually available in both whole and processed form. On the same day, one might find apples and applesauce, carrot sticks and fruit cups. The options are plentiful-- sometimes too much so for my little second graders, who sit down with way more than they'll ever eat. Luckily, the cafeteria has a table where students can put food they have not eaten and other students can take it. This system minimizes wasted food and provides children ownership over their meals.

Unfortunately, this ownership is something most of the children aren't necessarily ready for. In second grade, students study nutrition, and I noticed during this unit that my kids would say (with seven-year-old enthusiasm, so you're going to have to imagine how cute it sounds) "Hey, Ms. Emily, I have two fruits and a grain and a meat!" However, as nutrition gave way to other studies, the kids' attention to balanced meals waned. Most days, they gobble their entrees and drink their milk, leaving salads, oranges, and pears behind. This makes sense; while school lunches don't include desserts, most of the food is so loaded with sugary substances that the kids don't crave the natural sweetness of fruit (except high fructose corn syrup-loaded "strawberry" applesauce).

In fact, what sparked this whole post for me was picking up a container of so-called marinara sauce this afternoon and looking at the label. I don't remember all of the ingredients, but the first few were "water, tomato paste, high fructose corn syrup, salt." I think there was some dehydrated garlic in there too. I know that a lot of tomato sauce contains HFCS, but for it to be the third ingredient, and particularly when the first is water, was truly disturbing to see. It's supposed to be tomato sauce, and tomatoes don't come first? Just to get the whole picture, this marinara comes with "Max Stix"-- white bread sticks stuffed with cheese. They come in packages of two, right out of the microwave-like warmer the lunch entrees spend their mornings enjoying. I know, I know-- HFCS is the foodie "enemy" and is an overrated bad guy. But it still bothers me, just like the corn syrup and corn starch (for thickening) in the chocolate milk bother me.

Another point: condiments. I know a lot of kids enjoy putting ketchup and bbq sauce on their food. I do too! But at our school my kids will eat more condiments than lunch, if allowed. They come up with the most innovative dipping strategies. My students put taco sauce on pizza, ketchup on lasagna, and miracle whip on rolls. My personal favorite came last week. I handed a boy a cup of ranch (for his carrots, or so I believed). Five minutes later, I saw him chomping on a ranch-doused banana. Go figure.

I want real food in the schools. I want marinara sauce made from tomatoes, milk without added sweetener, meat that isn't gray, and...well, I could go on, but I won't. I would so much rather see kids eating good food and good dessert than these substitutes for both. School lunches are free for most of my students, because their parents don't make enough money to provide the good food they deserve, so surely the government has a responsibility to give the kids access to quality nutrition. Across the country, people are working to get real kitchens and real ingredients back into schools. I just hope that these grassroots groups become mainstream sooner rather than later.

Jamie Oliver's TED Wish

Hey folks. No recipes at the moment (although I think we've got both Fish and Chips and some southwest Indian cuisine coming up), but Jamie Oliver is one of Iain's favorite chefs, and this is an awesome speech that is well worth watching in its entirety.

Happy Sunday. :-)

Musings on Poverty and Cooking

So this isn't going to be a recipe post. Sorry for those hoping for one! No, this is just me (Emily), sitting on my couch on a Thursday evening, eating apple sauce still warm out of the pot. We had about 10 apples left from a trip to our friend Annika's hobby farm a few weeks back, and most of them were not so great for eating plain since they had a lot of weird stuff on the peels (no pesticides for the Johnson family!). However, these apples were great for saucing and making into pies and stuff. I just used up the last of them and would like to point out that homemade applesauce is so much astonishingly better than the stuff from a jar that it's hardly the same food. Also, I lied about this being a no recipe post, because applesauce is just too easy. No pictures though. So:

Homemade Applesauce

Ingredients

• 5-10 apples, peeled (or not-- I usually do half and half), cored, and chopped into thin slices or small chunks
• 1/4-1 cup water
• cinnamon to taste--probably between 1-3 tsp. Or a cinnamon stick if you've got one
• brown or white sugar to taste. I usually put in 1/3-1/2 cup, but some people like more or less. It depends on the number of apples and how tart they are.
• a dash of lemon juice. (completely optional, but I like it.)
• a little drizzle of molasses (this is useful if you don't have brown sugar, or if you don't want to use brown sugar in your applesauce, since it's more expensive than the white stuff)

Procedure

• Put the apples in a pot and cover with the water. I'm bad at judging amounts here, but basically you want it to be enough that you can bring the apples to a simmer. Don't go overboard though, since the apples will produce a lot of water themselves. Throw some of the cinnamon and lemon juice on top, remembering that you can always adjust proportions later. Bring to a simmer and let it hang out for a while, probably 15-30 minutes, until the apples are pretty soft.
• Use a potato masher or a food processor to mash up the soft apples (I prefer the former, but I like really chunky sauce).
• Add the sugar, turn the heat up a bit, and let it cook uncovered for a bit. Stir it a lot. It should thicken. If not, dump out some of the excess water and adjust spices. Or you could let it sit longer until the water evaporates, but I'm not patient.
• And there you have it. Fresh, relatively healthy, pretty cheap, ridiculously tasty applesauce!

And that's just my point really. Fresh food is usually healthier, tastier, and well...I wouldn't say always cheaper, but certainly it's cheaper than buying prepared food of a similar caliber. And it depends so much on what one's hobbies and leisure activities are. For Iain and Bozzie and me, food is a recreational activity. Cooking is a way to have fun. It's a way to come together and enjoy one another's company. It's a way to relieve stress. And, I think in part because cooking is all of that for us, our other pleasures tend to be less pricey. They're, for the most part, simple. We read aloud, we watch movies, we play instruments, we write. Sure, we go out for coffee and all, but much of what we love is close to free. That feels good, and it gives us more excuses to spend on good food.

Our food focus has also affected dramatically the items we make ourselves. For example, yesterday I got home from work, realized that we didn't have any regular sandwich bread, and didn't even think of going to the store. Instead I just grabbed the yeast and mixing bowl. Now I have two awesome wheat loaves, each of which would probably have run me $3-$4 in a bakery and instead cost me a couple bucks tops for ingredients and oven time. Sure, I can buy cheap sandwich bread, but this stuff is hearty, has nothing bad for me in it except canola oil, and tastes so much better. Plus it's great for gifting to people.

Now, don't get me wrong-- I understand that baking takes time. People who have more demanding jobs than I and kids and whatnot don't necessarily have time for all this. But for me, and for my housemates, it's becoming a matter of course. We laugh about it. Pizza for us means homemade dough and tomato sauce. Curry doesn't come out of a jar. A "quick fix dinner" sometimes means thai kitchen or mac and cheese, but it often means omelets and potatoes or something. Whole foods (not the store but real, unprocessed ingredients) make up the bulk of our pantry and fridge. And I'm wondering now how soon that's going to change, or if it will at all. Is that what our society is moving back to? Many of our friends are acting similarly, putting priorities on real food and simple pleasures and a slower life. Not that I plan to give up the internet anytime soon. So is this just what it is to be young and have time, or is this the seed of a greater shift in the way Americans treat food? I hope we are experiencing a shift. Places like the Seward Co-op deserve our patronage, and ingredient labels should be short and ingredients recognizable. At least that's what I think.

I work in an elementary school, and I adore my job, but I noticed the first day that the school lunches come individually wrapped, like airplane food, and the quality doesn't seem much better. There's a 10 day rotation, so the kids go through their entrees quickly before the cycle starts over. Some options, like the pizza and mini cheeseburgers (complete with plastic wrap), seem pretty popular, but there are days where almost nobody eats his or her main course in its entirety because it's just plain unappetizing. There is no cooking at my school; I'm not even sure if there are ovens. Instead everything comes prepared and is zapped before the kids pick it up. I can't comment on the nutritional content of the food, but there's little done to make the veggies appetizing, so more often than not they're thrown away. I do have to give the menu planners some props for including a lot of applesauce, but even that is corn syrup-filled, and some of the other produce options are completely incomprehensible to me. Seven-year-olds do not like raw yellow squash slices, even with ranch (another brilliant stroke as far as getting kids to eat their veggies is concerned). Heck, I don't like raw squash. But that's just it-- the veggies aren't incorporated. They're left out as these strange things that many of the students aren't interested in. And while I think there's great value in veggies as themselves, I first learned to appreciate the variety of veggies on this earth through stir fries and curries and pasta primavera. I hope that these kids will get the chance to do the same.

Maybe I'll continue on this thought sometime, but I think I'm done for now. It's all so interesting to ponder.