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 Breakfast

By Ed Bruske

Egg and sausage quesadilla with chocolate milk and baked apples.

Often, processed foods arrive at school in individual plastic packaging and are simply reheated as is from the frozen state. The kitchen at my daughter's school has a commercial steamer that heats meal items while still in the plastic, making service a breeze. They are displayed just like this in the food line.

What you see here in the plastic wrapper is an egg and sausage breakfast quesadilla. My daughter complained that she didn't want the quesadilla. What she had really wanted was a yogurt. But she said the kitchen staff would not allow her to make an exchange, so she asked me to intervene.

I took the offending quesadilla back to the food line, but when I tried to trade it in for a container of yogurt I got a real hard time from the woman sitting at the cash register, who wagged her finger at me and said, "No! No! No!" She said there were no exchanges allowed, but when I took the yogurt anyway she made me remove the quesadilla. "We can't take food back," she said.

Shouldn't the kichen crew be making eating more healthful food easier for the kids, not harder?


My daughter's breakfast companion declared the quesadilla "good." This is how she ate it after opening the plastic--like a sandwich.

Ed Bruske writes The Slow Cook blog.

School Lunch: Frozen Juice

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

According to my daughter, the juice served at her school invariably is frozen. My visits to the cafeteria confirm that. The juice arrives at the school frozen, either in a carton like this or in plastic containers with foil seals, then is moved to a refrigerator to thaw, but never really gets an adequate chance to convert to its liquid form.

The kids, however, don't seem to mind at all. They make sport of it, turning the frozen juice into "slush."

Here you can see how my daughter has peeled the carton of orange juice open so she can dig into it with one of the plastic combination spoon/forks (sporks) that are always available in the cafeteria. After pounding away at the frozen mass, they eat it more like ice cream, then suck up any liquids with a straw.

According to the label, this 4-ounce carton of OJ contains 12 grams of sugar, or slightly less, ounce-for-ounce, than Coca-Cola. Many schools such as those in the District of Columbia have banned sugary soft drinks, but there's just as much sugar in "healthy" drinks such as juice and flavored milks.