What's for Lunch: Gooey BBQ Chicken

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

My daughter says she doesn't like the chicken at school because it's "never cooked right." She says it's either overcooked, or it's covered in sticky barbecue sauce.

Well, in the case of the barbecue chicken, I'd say she's way off the mark. There's no lack of sauce. But I thought the meat was done about as well as you might expect. It was downright edible, in fact. The only question is, How exactly are you supposed to eat it?

As you can see in the photo, my fingers were quickly covered in the gooey sauce--the kind that comes out of a big plastic jar. Tasty, but pretty sugary.

A stroll around the lunch room revealed that most of the kids also had their hands covered in sauce.

The reason, of course, is that a plastic spork is virtually useless against a bone-in chicken breast, although some kids tried. Mostly they picked at the chicken, and by that I mean chiseled, using the spork to break off pieces of meat.

Before lunch was over, kids were swarming into the nearby bathrooms across the hall to wash their hands. I swear, this is one school lunch that should be served with moist towelettes.

Then there were a couple of girls at my daughter's table who just went for the skin, peeling it off and slurping up all that sugary sauce. When I asked one of them why she was doing that, she replied: "I really don't like chicken."

She just likes the skin slathered in sauce.

As you might guess, the kids didn't do much with the green beans or the rice you see on these trays. That mostly got tossed in the trash. But some of them did poke around the baked beans. Those also were tarted up with sugar.

Lesson: kids love food spiked with sugar.

What's for Breakfast: Tyson Chicken Sandwich

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

They're back!

D.C. Schools Food Services Director Jeffrey Mills has complained that Chartwells, the company contracted to serve meals to the system's 45,000 students, continues to dish up Tyson chicken products even after they've been asked not too.

I wonder if that includes these breakfast sandwiches, heated and served while still in their plastic packing. That's what kids were getting this morning at my daughter's elementary school. (The parents in the cafeteria did not blink an eye, as far as I could tell. They just watched their kids tear the plastic away and start eating.)

I wrote about these sandwiches a month ago. Here are the ingredients:

SAUSAGE: Boneless dark chicken meat with skin, seasoning (salt, dextrose, spices, beef extract, maltodextrin, autolyzed yeast, natural flavor, modified food starch, onion powder, tocopherols, garlic powder, gelatin), modified food starch, water, sodium phosphates, caramel color, natural flavors.

BISCUIT: White wheat 100% whole wheat flour, enriched bleached flour (wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), water, shortening (interesterified soybean, with distilled monoglycerides added), sugar, honey, baking powder (sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium bicarbonate, cornstarch, calcium sulfate, monocalcium phosphate), buttermilk solids, salt, xanthan gum, mono and diglycerides.

Nutrition Facts

• Serving Size: 1 PATTIE W/ BIS (94g)
• Servings Per Container: About 100

• Amount Per Serving
• Calories from Fat 90 Calories 260

% Daily Value*

• 17% Total Fat 11g
  • 20% Saturated Fat 4g
  • Trans Fat 0g
  • Polyunsaturated Fat 3g
  • Monounsaturated Fat 3g
• 12% Cholesterol 35mg
• 22%Sodium 520mg
• 9%Total Carbohydrate 27g
  • 8%Dietary Fiber 2g
  • Sugars 5g
• 28%Protein 14g

• Vitamin C 4%Vitamin A 2%
• Iron 10%Calcium 10%

Note the salt content: 520 milligrams. That's 22 percent of an adult daily requirement.

These little sandwiches are built to last. According to information Tyson provides via its website, this product has a shelf life of 270 days.

Who Knew? Kids Love Chicken Liver!

Squishy, slimy chicken liver: kids love it

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

Sometimes I like to test the kids in my food appreciation classes with a food I'm sure they'll find repulsive. Not long ago it was squid. This week, I brought them chicken liver. And just to challenge them even more, I urged them to pick up with liver in their hands and feel it. Pretty gross, no?

I think it's important for kids to experience food with all of their senses--including their sense of touch. And if we're going to kill animals, I think they should learn about all the edible parts. Of course they backed away from the chicken livers at first. But pretty soon they were playing with them and having a great time, as you see here. And when the livers were cooked--surprise!--the kids wolfed them down asked for more. (Well, maybe not all of the kids. But a surprising number, I'd say.)

This was all part of our continuing world culinary tour. We've been lingering in Spain recently, cooking all kinds of tapas or small plate dishes. But it was time to move on to France. The southwestern part of that country is known for its various treatments of ducks and geese, as in confit of duck--or duck preserved in its own fat--and turned into a delectable stew with beans and pork called cassoulet. I would love for my kids to make cassoulet, but it takes about three days to prepare properly, so I searched through Paula Wolfert's definitive book, The Cooking of Southwest France, and found a recipe for a watercress salad with duck (or chicken) liver.

Not having ready access to duck liver, I opted for the chicken liver at the local supermarket. I also switched baby salad greens for the watercress. In any case, this is a wonderful salad with crisp apple, strips of salami, walnut oil and sherry vinegar--ingredients we don't use every day, but truly representative of a certain part of the world where they pay close attention to the flavors derived from particular local ingredients.

Start by soaking one chicken liver per person in lightly salted milk for at least three hours. I'm not sure exactly what the milk is supposed to do, except perhaps soften the liver flavor. Then rinse the livers thoroughly in a colander and drain them well. Set the colander aside over paper towels so the livers can dry a little while you prepare the rest of the salad.

You'll need half of a crisp apple, unpeeled and thinly sliced. Toss the slices with the juice from 1/2 lemon, then add 1/2 leek, cleaned and thinly sliced. Add a mix of baby greens--or watercress if you have it.

Cut one slice of garlicky salami per person, then cut the slices into thin strips. Set aside.

In a separate bowl, make a vinaigrette with the juice of 1/2 lemon, 1 tablespoon sherry vinegar, 1 tablespoon walnut oil and 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil. Season with salt and freshly ground black pepper and whisk until thickened.

To finish the livers, cook in a heavy skillet with plenty of butter over moderately low heat. You don't want to burn the livers, just cook them gently until lightly browned. Turn them once. When they are cooked through, remove from heat.

Toss the salad with enough vinaigrette to lightly coat. Arrange the salad on individual plates and garnish with the sliced salami. Place chicken livers in the middle of the greens and serve. Watch the kids gobble it up.

What's for Lunch: Uneaten Chicken Fajitas

Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

This meal was a great disappointment to me, and not because the food wasn't good. I was just baffled that the kids showed so little interest in eating it.

As you can see, the large, whole wheat tortilla was filled with strips of seasoned chicken. These arrive at the school frozen. It's no trouble reheating them in the commercial steamer. But apparently, most of the kids thought the tortilla and the chicken inside were "nasty."

As best I could tell, only a couple of them in the entire lunchroom were actually picking the tortilla up and eating it. A few nibbled around the edges. Otherwise, they just left it on the tray untouched.

As frequently occurs, the kids have absolutely no idea what to do with the condiments on the side--in this case the lettuce, the chopped tomato and the grated cheddar cheese. At my table, I demonstrated how these were supposed to be piled on top of the chicken inside the tortilla. Looks lovely, no?

The refried beans--out of a can--weren't any better than they look. They were merely edible. Otherwise, I thought this was a terrific meal that mostly went into the trash.

What's for Lunch: Chicken Sandwich

By Ed Bruske
aka The slow Cook

I tried to interest daughter in this chicken sandwich when I noticed it on the Chartwells menu website. But she was having none of it.

"Those chicken patties aren't any good," she said. "They're dry."

But this was no chicken patty, but a piece of seasoned chicken breast. It thought it was great.


Here's a view of the chicken under the hood.

On the side was what Chartwells called an "ancho chili sauce." Typically, the kids don't know what to do with the sandwich dressings. But I do. I'm building my sandwich the way it was intended with the lettuce and tomato over the chicken and the chili sauce on the bun.

Here's a side view. You can see how thick the breast was--and moist.

Those carrots and green beans did get more than usual interest from the kids. They usually barely touch the vegetables on their trays. But I think the carrots added some interest. The Chartwells menu called for a "garlic and herb vegetable medley with squash, carrots and green beans." I didn't see any squash, but the carrots and green beans were good enough for me.

What the kids really wanted was that plastic cup of canned peaches.

Altogether, I thought this was a terrific lunch--even if my daughter didn't.

What's for Lunch: Pizza!

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

Pizza is still kids' favorite food at school. Our daughter, seen here, doesn't care for most of the cafeteria fare at her elementary school. But her eyes lit up when we checked the Chartwells menu site and learned that lunch would be pizza!

Hooray!

It was an extra long slice. I took a couple of bites and found it to be pretty gummy. What do you expect from a frozen pizza re-heated for a couple of hundred kids? It didn't taste terrible. It was just very bready.

But my daughter loved it. She's had so many great pizzas in her life--many of them we made ourselves--I wonder if she isn't tasting the memory of pizza more than what was actually served.


This is what the complete meal looked like. As if there wasn't enough starch already in the pizza, they added more with the potato wedges. The USDA has proposed that kids get a maximum two servings per week--or one cup total--of starchy vegetables like potatoes in the federally-subsidized school meals program.

Potatoes happen to be kids' second-favorite food at school--right after pizza. So this meal was guaranteed to hit them right where it counts. But enjoy those potatoes while you can. They'll soon be replaced with sweet potatoes or other orange vegetables--or dark green vegetables.


My daughter begged me to get another tray of food so she could have more potato wedges. Fat chance.

The kids also dove into the pineapple cup. They like fruit--the sweeter the better. But not so much the green beans. These were advertised as "seasoned green beans," which translated as canned green beans tossed with "butter substitute" and garlic. Needless to say, the kids didn't touch them.




Here was the alternate cold meal: salad with chicken. A few of the kids chose this. One fifth-grade girl told me she just likes salad.

Good for her.

What's for Lunch: Chicken Florentine?

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Here's another example of some of the clever new options we're seeing on the menu in D.C. schools this year. Someone thought to take a piece of flat bread and cover it with "chicken Florentine."

Where I come from, "chicken Florentine" means sauteed chicken tossed with spinach and a wine-infused cream sauce. This was a bit more like a pizza (kids love pizza, as we know). I tried it and did not taste any cream or wine, although it was perfectly palatable--more a mouthful of spinach with a bit of onion and some scattered pieces of diced chicken, all topped with some melted cheese.

The kids, on the other hand, looked at it and were completely intimidated by all that spinach.


This looked like a repeat of the homemade spinach lasagna experience we've seen before, where kids assiduously work their way around the spinach to get at the pasta and the cheese. In the case of this chicken Florentine, I was surprised to see that most of the kids in the lunch room never touched it.

Just to make sure, I took a walk around the lunch room and, sure enough, the entree in most cases was entirely uneaten. Some of the children--we're talking elementary school kids in the upper grades--were tentatively nibbling on the flat bread around the edges. Others, like this girl here, were a bit more bold. They had scraped all the spinach off the flat bread, then attacked the bread and picked through the green matter to get at the cheese and chicken bits.

On the tray also were some carrot sticks tossed in ranch dressing that were definitely more popular. Many of the kids also had sampled the peas. But just a note here on that: peas are one of those "starchy vegetables," along with potatoes, corn and lima beans, that the USDA proposes in new meal guidelines to sharply limit in the future.

The federal government would like to serve kids much bigger portions of things they don't normally like--vegetables and whole grains--and take away things kids really love, like potatoes (especially French fries). Sound like a winning formula?

What's for Lunch: Chicken on the Bone

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook



What happened to chicken nuggets?



They've been replaced by real chicken on the bone. These chicken pieces arrive frozen, then they're roasted in a convection oven. I've tried them, and they're pretty good. The kids also like them. In this case, according to the Chartwell's website, they come "Caribbean jerk seasoned."



A couple of otherwise things on this tray are noteworthy. The broccoli, for instance, is "local," meaning purchases from growers here in the Mid-Atlantic region. And the kitchen seems to be making a more concerted effort not to obliterate the broccoli in the cooking process. I can't vouch for all of the kitchens in all of the District of Columbia's schools, but at least our lunch ladies are taking some care around the vegetables.



Secondly, that brown rice you see in the "bayou rice and beans" is what passes for "brown rice." There's a big push to serve more "whole grains" in the federally-subsidized school meals program. Brown rice happens to be the only grain that's available to schools through the U.S. Department of Agriculture's commodity foods program. Everything else is processed, as in that dinner roll in the photo.



And boy, were the bananas ever green.

What's for Lunch: Chicken Wrap

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Here's some news: frozen food doesn't have to be bad. For instance, you can do some pretty amazing things with frozen chicken.

Okay, so it isn't local, pastured chicken. It comes from a factory farm (CAFO: confined animal feedlot operation) far away, processed most likely by an industry giant like Tyson. But this is, after all, school food, made on a tight budget and frequently chicken is on the list of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's commodity foods, meaning schools get a substantial break on the price.

When you make school food, you also have to make some compromises.

In Boulder, Colorado, I had a fabulous barbecued chicken sandwich made from frozen "diced chicken." There, Ann Cooper has hired professional chefs to devise recipes that turn simple frozen and canned products into delicious cafeteria food. Here you see "honey mustard chicken," as Chartwells calls it, wrapped in a "whole wheat" tortilla with lettuce.

This is offered on Tuesday's as the cold alternate to the hot meal selection in D.C. schools. It's not true that school food has to be bad. But making it better does require some imagination and motivation to spend a little extra effort.

To be honest, however, few of the kids at my daughter's elementary school choose options like this and I think that's primarily because they just aren't familiar. As I learned during my week in Boulder, where the food services department was actively recruiting parents and student interns to help in the cafeterias, it takes active taste-testing and coaching in the cafeterias to get kids to eat new and different foods.

Unfortunately, here in D.C. we haven't seen any effort on the part of our local food services team to collaborate with parents or the broader community. We can hardly get them to communicate anything at all.

What's for Lunch: Spicy Chicken Fajita

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

To compare with the chicken fajita I photographed earlier this week, I give you the same dish as it was presented in September. The frozen and re-heated diced chicken is the same, but here the pinto beans were deployed as posted on the Chartwells menu website rather than the black beans.

This student apparently ordered the fajita without the whole wheat tortilla.

But notice also that the "peach cup," meaning canned peaches, was being served without the cup. Likewise, the "salsa cup" consisted of salsa ladled directly onto the tray. Lately, these items have been served in actual plastic cups and one might wonder why, since the kids don't seem to care either way and those plastic cups not only don't come free, they create more waste for the landfill.

What's for Lunch: Chicken Fajita

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Chartwells at its menu website advertised this as "spicy chicken fajita with roasted onions and peppers in a whole wheat tortilla." Honestly, I'm not seeing the roasted onions and peppers. What I'm seeing is corn and black beans, probably frozen corn and canned black beans.

The menu also called for "Southwest pinto beans," so I suppose you'd have to count the black beans as a substitution. On the side is a "salsa cup." I heard one girl remark, "I really like the salsa," but I didn't get a chance to taste it.

Would this qualify as one of those instances of over-hyping a menu?

The menu also called for a "locally grown apple," but this looks more like canned peaches. Since the schools receive an extra five cents for every lunch meal that contains a locally grown product, I wonder how they account for meals that say they're supposed to have a locally grown piece of fruit but then don't deliver.


In case you were wondering where the chicken was on this chicken fajita, some of the kids opted not to take the corn and beans, revealing the chicken underneath. This is diced chicken that arrives at the schools pre-cooked and frozen. Add the salsa and I suppose it wouldn't look so plain.

Here's the alternate for Mondays: a whole wheat bagel with sunflower butter, string cheese and "marinated tomato and cucumber salad." The vegetables sure brighten up this tray, but I don't see much marinade. If you were a kid, would you eat this?

Not pictured: the sunflower butter and the other half of the bagel. Maybe it was being eaten when I snapped this photo.

What's for Lunch: Chicken with a Ton of Starch

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

According to the Chartwells menu website, this meal consisted of baked barbecue chicken with a whole wheat roll, a salad of romaine lettuce and local tomatoes, "herb-roasted" potato wedges with shredded carrot, and locally grown watermelon.

Well, the roll has turned into a bun, the tomatoes are missing from the salad and replacing the watermelon appears to be a peach.

This isn't particularly surprising. Sometimes the cafeteria may not have exactly what's posted on the menu on-line and substitutes something else. But here you have a case of bread and potato together, and double-whammy of starch that's sure to get kids' insulin pumping. Insulin is the body's fat storage hormone. But USDA regulations require grain servings, and potatoes qualify as a vegetable.

Adding grated carrots to roasted potatoes (no doubt re-heated from frozen) is an interesting concept. The kids definitely like the chicken.

What's for Lunch: Chicken on a Bun

Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

This meal illustrates the limits of trying to reform school meals around a meal service provider like Chartwells. Although there have been lots of encouraging changes around the edges of the cafeteria tray--fresh fruits and vegetables, cheeses, even some items cooked from scratch--it's hard to lose the processed entree in the center.

Our new food services director here in D.C. says he and his crew recently tested dozens of different "chicken products." This appears to be one: a chicken patty on a whole wheat bun.



As you can see from the photo, it comes with these phony grill marks (are the kids supposed to think the kitchen ladies are grilling them out in the parking lot?). They arrive frozen in boxes, then are reheated typically in the convection oven. If I could get my hands on the shipping container, I could tell you what's in them. Under "Healthy Schools" legislation passed by the D.C. Council, the schools this year are required to post the ingredients for all meal items. They're projecting an interactive website to be up and running sometime in November.

In case you were wonder about the salad in the paper boat, that's actually the toppings that are supposed to go on the chicken. Kids at the elementary school level are typically mystified by this sort of food service. I did not see any of them putting the lettuce, tomato and "ancho sauce" on their sandwich, nor did I see anyone coaching them in how to do it. Mostly it ends up in the trash.

Chartwells' menu description for the canned beans is over the top: "campfire baked vegetarian baked beans."

But don't you love the kid-size apple?

What's for Lunch: Cajun Chicken

Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Chartwells calls this "Cajun chicken" at its menu website. It's bone-in chicken that arrives seasoned, cooked and frozen. It simply needs to be reheated to serve. On the left is "bayou brown rice with beans," which means rice cooked in the school kitchen's steamer, then tossed with canned black beans and seasonings.

In the upper left is "fresh vegetable medley with carrots, broccoli and locally grown zucchini." The carrots and broccoli arrive already cut into pieces and refrigerated in plastic bags. They and the zucchini are then cooked in the steamer. The kitchen crew did a good job with this: the zucchini was still al dente, meaning not cooked to death. But there wasn't much seasoning to taste.

Unfortunately, the kids who chose the vegetable option didn't really eat it. Knowing how much adults think vegetables are the solution to the obesity epidemic, it's a shame to see them tossed into the trash. But maybe the kids learn something by seeing freshly cooked produce on their trays. Or maybe they could use a little coaching....


The menu also called for "carrot sticks." Obviously, not all of the kids chose the carrot sticks, and as you can see, what was served was actually "sanded" carrots packed in plastic with a side of Kraft Italian dressing. Also affectionately known as "baby" carrots, these carrots are nothing of the kind. They are in fact mature carrots that have been mechanically "sanded," or ground down to look like baby carrots. A California carrot farmer thought of this: just the thing to catch kids' interest, right? Sanded carrots are now a huge business.

Finally, this was the alternate lunch on Thursday, what Chartwells calls "grilled chicken Caesar salad with croutons and light Italian dressing.

Caesar salad with Italian dressing?

Anyway, the "grilled" chicken is actually diced chicken that arrives cooked and frozen. Once thawed, it's easy to toss this into a salad. But look: real Romaine lettuce, I think, not that iceberg mix. And croutons, too.

Unlike much of the fruit D.C. schools have been serving this year, the pear apparently is not local. However, it is very close to ripe and the kids really like it.

First Glimpse of Revolution Foods in D.C. Public Schools

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

This year D.C. Public Schools hired out two pilot food projects, one to Revolution Foods, the other to D.C. Central Kitchen, to initiate a little competition with Chartwells, the company that acts as food service manager to most of the schools in the system. So far, school officials have kept the pilot projects under tight wraps. But here we have a photograph of the Revolution Foods lunch served today, snapped by a parent.

Here's this parent's description of the meal:

"[My daughter] waited in a very short line and was served a surprisingly delicious looking meal. She had roast chicken in a light, tasty sauce, roasted red potatoes with a touch of melted cheese, and collard greens, which were good, but slightly dry, fresh fruit (choice of apple or orange), with whole grain crackers, (that she couldn't eat because of the gluten) and milk (that she can't drink cause of dairy) - all-in-all, an excellent school lunch."

The Revolution Foods menu on the school website described the meal as "all natural BBQ chicken with cheesy potatoes with seasonal vegetables and fresh fruit." The vegetarian alternate appeared to be "garden vegetable bean soup with Milton's crackers and fresh fruit."

The contract structure with Revolution Foods and D.C. Central Kitchen are somewhat different than the contract the schools have with Chartwells. The contract with Chartwells is "cost-reimbursable," meaning Chartwells charges an annual administrative fee ($1 million) plus a fee for each meal it serves, and bills the schools for all its expenses. Revolution Foods and D.C. Central Kitchen are paid a set price for each meal, regardless of their expenses.

What's for Lunch: Chicken Sandwich

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

My daughter looked at the Chartwells menu for lunch, saw it was a chicken sandwich and decided she didn't want any part of it. She packed her own lunch. She just doesn't like the processed chicken patty on this sandwich. The lettuce and tomato salad you see here is actually intended as a topping for the sandwich, with a plastic container of barbecue sauce to finish it off. It looked more like peanut sauce to me, and I don't think I saw any of the kids use the salad or the sauce as it was intended. Were they supposed to get instructions in the food line?

What looks like cucumbers is actually "locally grown zucchini," according to the Chartwells website. I assumed the pear was local, but the website does not say so. The schools would get an extra five cents from the District of Columbia to pay for this lunch by virtue of the zucchini being local. But vegetable side dishes are a hard sell in the cafeteria, and the kids were not exactly attacking these zucchini.

I stayed through the entire lunch period to see what the kids did with their pear. Was it ripe? Was it edible? Would they eat it? It turned out to be a little hard, but the kids seemed to like it. Like most whole fruit served in schools, it was bigger than they needed. But what they did eat, they ate with relish. In Berkeley, Calif., the schools have found an orchardist who sells them his small, kid-size apples. Would it be hard--cheaper maybe?--to find growers here who can supply smaller fruit?

Yesterday's Lunch: Teryaki Chicken

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

I hate to miss a school meal, especially the first one of the year when D.C. food service staff are pushing to make improvements. But I could not be in the cafeteria yesterday. I did, however, manage to find out what was in the teryaki chicken Chartwells served.

That would be the "fully cooked, coated" eight-piece, bone-in chicken from Tyson. According to the packing label, these are the ingredients, besides the chicken: Water, seasoning (salt, hydrolyzed corn protein, extrose, onion powder, autolyzed yeast extract, garlic powder, soybean oil, spice extract), sodium phophates.

And the chicken was "coated with": Water, coating (modified corn starch, tapioca dextrin, dried whey, soy protein isolate, sodium alginate, caramel (color), sodium tripolyphosphate, methylcellulose, guar gum).

The cooking instructions call for 10 to 15 minutes in a 375-degree convection oven from the frozen state.

Also on the menu was a "whole wheat roll," a "crunchy" spinach salad, "orange glazed" carrots and "locally grown" watermelon. Under the "Healthy School Act" passed earlier this year by the D.C. Council, the schools receive an extra five cents for every lunch that includes a locally grown component, meaning from within the Mid-Atlantic region.

The spinach, on the other hand, came from a place called The Salad Farm in Salinas, Calif. That business is actually a complex of growers and processors that harvest crops in both California and Arizona. The history, starting with a man named Lex Camany, who worked in lettuce fields to make money for college, is worth a read. At one point, Camany conducted agricultural research for the Mexican government. Then he started a strawberry department at Hartnell College.

So many American success stories touch the federal school meals program.

What's for Lunch: Baked Chicken

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

This is the last lunch of the season for us. Actually, this meal was served last week. It's hard to argue with baked chicken: unless, of course, you object to chicken cooked in a factory hundreds of miles away, shipped frozen and reheated. The kids seem to like it well enough. It has that breading reminiscent of Popeye's or something, only it's a bit more like concrete. But the breading qualifies as a grain serving under the federal rules governing the school lunch program, and each meal needs a grain offering.

There are two vegetables on this tray. Can you guess what they are? If you named ketchup, your head is still in the Reagan era. Actually, the Tater Tots, even though they might as well be bread for all the starch they contain, qualify as a vegetable. Potatoes of all sorts are kids' second-most favorite thing to eat at school, right behind pizza. And as you can see, they go to great lengths to spice up those Tater Tots with the ketchup.

Then we have the frozen peas and carrots. Would you eat these? Most kids don't eat the vegetable side dishes served in D.C. schools. They mostly end up in the trash. But the government requires that schools offer vegetables. What's a food service provider to do?

In fact, the 10-year-old who brought this tray back from the food line needn't have taken the peas and carrots at all. Under federal rules, schools are required to offer five items, and kids are only required to select three. The strawberry-flavored milk would have sufficed as the third item.

But you can say goodbye to strawberry milk. Beginning next week, school officials say they will no longer be serving flavored milk at all. If you believe the dairy industry, we should be bracing for an outbreak of rickets. How will kids get the calcium and Vitamin D they need if they are denied chocolate or strawberry milk?

Here's one case where the food services department for D.C. Public Schools actually seems to be ahead of public opinion.

What's for Lunch: Chicken & Rice

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Chartwells, the company that provides food service under contract to D.C. Public Schools, calls this "cheesy chicken with rice casserole." I'd never seen it before, but I can assure you there's no casserole involved. Notice how they try to make industrially processed convenience food sound like something off a restaurant menu, or maybe a Sunday church supper?

My guess is the rice was cooked in the kitchen's commercial steamer. The chicken, most likely from the government's commodity surplus program, probably arrived frozen, then was stirred into the rice with pre-shredded cheese. Most recipes out of the Chartwells book involve a minimum number of ingredients and just three or four steps to prepare. It would not be unkind to call them idiot proof. They are designed for kitchen workers with minimal skill and only basic cooking apparatus.

The kids seemed to like the chicken and rice well enough. At the Chartwells website, the menu also called for "glazed carrots." That's a fancy description for carrots cut into rounds that arrive frozen in bags, then are heated in the steamer. I did not observe any "glaze." They just looked dull and listless, like most vegetable side dishes that come out of the school kitchen. It's typically hit or miss whether the kids even opt to have them placed on their tray in the food line. Most of the trays I observed did not have carrots on them.

Adults seem to think that if we only put more vegetables in school cafeterias, meals will get healthier. Frankly, I think adults are a bit delusional on this point. If you spend any time at all around school lunch, you quickly realize that most school kitchens are incapable of preparing vegetable side dishes that kids will actually eat. In addition, federal rules provide that the kids only have to choose three of the five items offered, so they can usually make a complete "meal" without at vegetable side dish at all. From what I've seen, the vegetables that do make their way onto kids' trays typically end up uneaten and thrown in the trash.

One girl who did take the carrots was seated directly across from me. She speared one of the rounds with her "spork" and placed a carrot in her mouth, then quickly spit it out. "You didn't like it?" I asked. She just shook her head.

That's a fresh pear you see in the photo, plus an open container of strawberry milk. How would you rate this lunch?

What's for Lunch: Popcorn Chicken Scenes

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Chicken, along with pizza and potatoes, is one of kids' favorite things to eat at school. You see it in many different forms. When shaped into these little balls and breaded at the factory, they're called "popcorn" chicken. They arrive pre-cooked and frozen in bags, and are quickly reheated in a convection oven.

The other components for this meal are seasoned rice, iceberg lettuce salad and milk. Some of the kids also chose a piece of fruit. I saw pears and bananas on some of the trays.

Kids have fun with the popcorn chicken. Proper etiquette, I think, demands that you dab each one with a little ketchup, then eat it with your fingers.

More disturbing was seeing a very overweight fourth-grader convincing one of the girls at his table to give him her rice. She shoveled it onto his tray with her "spork" and he walked back to his seat with this huge portion. This is a load of starch he probably doesn't need. But there's no supervision for this sort of thing.

Later, I noticed that one of the girls had torn her popcorn chicken into little pieces. As if that weren't strange enough, she started stuffing the pieces in her pants pocket. When I asked her why, she said she was saving it for gym class, "when I get hungry."