What's for Breakfast: Muffin Square

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

I thought the item pictured here was coffee cake--a square piece of pasty cut from a larger pan. But I was corrected. This, I was told, was a "fresh-baked muffin square," in this case dotted with blueberries. (I could not get Blogger to load this photo in the correct, horizontal orientation.) And, in fact, it was baked in the kitchen by our own school cooks.

I tasted it, expecting it to be very sweet, like coffee cake. But it wasn't. I was glad it didn't contain a lot of sugar. We've worked hard trying to get sugar out of our local school food.

Accompanying the "muffin square" is a "yogurt cup," meaning Stonyfield organic vanilla yogurt, as a container of canned peaches. I wondered why these were being served in plastic containers. In the past, the yogurt and fruit typically was just spooned directly onto the tray, saving the expense and waste of the plastic cups. Is it to make the food look better in the photos?



Here's the alternate breakfast: Kashi Heart to Heart cereal with a cup of cottage cheese and a cup of those canned peaches. The kids like to joke that the Kashi "looks like dog food." I have to admit, it does bear a strong resemblance to kibbles. "But it tastes good," says my daughter, who eats it with her fingers. (She's lactose intolerant.)

A one-ounce container of Kashi Heart to Heart contains 5 grams of sugar, much less than the Apple Jacks and Chocolate-Frosted Mini Wheats the schools were serving last year.