What's for Breakfast: Scrambled Eggs on a Muffin

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

A year ago this egg/muffin sandwich probably would have been made in a factory and sent to the school frozen, where the kitchen crew would have heated it in a steamer still wrapped in plastic.

Things are a bit different now since Jeffrey Mills arrived on the scene as the new food services director for D.C. Public Schools. He retooled the Chartwells menu item by item, replacing most of those highly processed frozen convenience foods with meals made from actual ingredients.

That means our lunch ladies are actually cooking from scratch in many cases. To make this breakfast, for instance, they scramble the eggs using liquid eggs that arrive in cartons. Okay, they're not whole, farm-fresh eggs from chickens raised on pasture. This is still school food we're talking about, made on a tight budget.

Also, most elementary schools wouldn't see breakfast served like this. They're eating breakfast in the classroom, which substantially increases participation for all those kids who might not be getting a good meal at home first thing in the morning and brings in extra reimbursement dollars from the federal government to help fund the program.

I've tasted this egg sandwich and the muffin is pretty bland. Imagine what the food will be like if they remove half the salt. That's what the USDA proposes schools do over the next 10 years in its new meal guidelines.

Some kids aren't interested in all that bread. This is how they eat the eggs--with their fingers.

What's for Breakfast: Egg & Sausage Sandwich

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

How does this breakfast look to you?

Scrambled eggs and a sausage patty on an English muffin, along with a carton of orange juice and some canned pears.

Schools constantly complain they don't have enough money to make better food. So why do they scoop the canned pears into a plastic cup they have to purchase, then pay to have hauled away when it's thrown in the trash?

Guidelines proposed by the USDA would restrict the amount of juice schools can serve as a replacement for whole fruit. What's wrong with juice? For one, it's missing all the fiber you get eating whole fruit. Also, juice is just the concentrated sugar--or fructose--from whole fruit. Kids don't need to be consuming all that sugar.

The eggs are scrambled from large cartons of liquid eggs delivered to the school kitchen. That's a big improvement over the eggs that were pre-scrambled in a factory and shipped to the schools frozen.

Unfortunately, the sausage patty doesn't have a lot of flavor. But that may be a permanent feature of school food. Those same proposed USDA guidelines call for schools to cut back on salt content by half.

Also, notice the kids in D.C. are still getting their food on disposable Styrofoam trays. Even at my daughter's school, where they have a commercial dishwasher, they're still using disposable Styrofoam trays.

The "Healthy Schools Act" approved by the D.C. Council last year calls on schools to replace Styrofoam with a more sustainable alternative, but only over a period of years.

This breakfast looks simple enough. But there's actually a lot going on here.

What's for Breakfast: Turkey & Cheese Muffin

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Chartwells calls this "toasty turkeyham and cheddar on a whole wheat muffin."

Our kitchen ladies did a good job of keeping the sandwich warm and I like the turkey ham. Not only was it toasty, but it really tasted like ham.

There's not much you can do with the cheddar. It's grated cheesed that gets piled onto the bread, then melts into a pretty nasty looking coating. I tried to eat it, but I couldn't pull it away from the muffin, which I wouldn't eat on account of the carbs, which I avoid at all costs.

A plan to close a $188 million budget gap here in the District of Columbia would eliminate the extra funding for school meals that had gone into effect this year by way of our Healthy Schools Act. That could spell the end of local fruits and vegetables on kids' trays. The law had provided an extra 5 cents for every lunch meal that contained a locally grown component.

What's for Breakfast: Buttered Muffin

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Chartwells at its menu website called for "fresh-baked peach muffin square" for breakfast. Instead what we saw at my daughter's school was a "buttered" English muffin, meaning a "butter alternate" presumably made from vegetable oil and flavored to taste like butter.
The kids seemed to like it well enough.

Next to it is a pool of vanilla yogurt, canned mixed fruit, apple juice and fat-free milk.

What's your vote? Good enough?

What's for Breakfast: Vegetable Omelette

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Chartwells was calling this egg dish a "skillet." It contains fresh zucchini, tomato and red bell pepper. It was made with eggs and vegetables poured into a stainless pan greased with Pam, then baked in the oven and cut into squares. I seemed to be the only one eating it in the cafeteria. The kids all went for the alternate, which was the muffin, cottage cheese and orange wedges.

Don't wedges seem like a better idea than serving a whole orange, much of which often ends up in the trash? It would be great if all fruit servings could be geared to elementary school appetites to avoid waste.

I liked the eggs, even though they could have used a little more salt. Cottage cheese seems like a much better way to work calcium into the menu compared to flavored milk, which D.C. schools have stopped serving this year. I just wish I knew where the muffin can from. It definitely is not Otis Spunkmeyer.

What's for Breakfast: Egg & Sausage Sandwich

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Chartwells at its menu website called this "toasty turkey ham and egg sandwich on a whole wheat English muffin." Looks more like turkey sausage to me, and obviously this little girl wasn't swayed. She took one bite out of the sandwich and removed the sausage. She's now turned her attention to the "chilled pineapple cup" that came with this breakfast.

I can report that the egg patty comes frozen from Michael Foods, Inc., in Minnetonka, Minn., which bills itself as "the world's largest egg processing company." We've written about Michael Foods before. They make a dubious "breakfast quesadilla" that was served in D.C. schools last year, heated and served in its plastic wrapper, as well as the infamous scrambled eggs that are cooked at the factory and arrive at schools frozen.

This year, Chartwells has taken a different approach. Rather than serving processed and packaged breakfast items like the aforementioned quessadilla, they are composing a breakfast entree from separate components. While the egg patty comes from Minnesota, the English muffin is made by Bake Crafters in Collegedale, Tenn. (We wrote about Bake Crafters yesterday and their whole grain bagel.)

I know you are dying to learn the ingredients in this package. Here's what's in the egg patty, according to the shipping container from Michael Foods:

"Whole eggs, water, soybean oil, modified food starch, whey solids, salt, non-fat dried milk and citric acid."

And here's what's in the English muffin, according to a shipping label from Bake Crafters:

"Whole wheat flour, enriched flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), water, yeast, wheat gluten. Contains less than 2% of each of the following: soybean oil, high fructose corn syrup, salt, calcium propionate, fumaric acid, baking soda, monocalcium phosphate, calcium sulfate, ammonium sulfate. Percentage of whole grain is 80%."