What's for Lunch: Spinach-Pickin' Lasagna

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

As I've written before, our local lunch ladies here in the District of Columbia have been making lots more food from scratch this year as part of a major overhaul of the Chartwells menu that began last summer under the direction of then-new food services Director Jeffrey Mills.

One of the featured items has been a spinach lasagna made by layering sheets of pasta with frozen spinach, tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese in stainless hotel pans. Some days it's better than others, but overall a great addition to the menu. Except the kids don't care for the spinach. Many of them go to great lengths to pick through the pasta and cheese to remove the spinach.

The version served yesterday at my daughter's elementary school seemed to have less spinach and more cheese, making the pickin' more difficult than usual. Still, some kids were determined not to eat the spinach. In this photo you see how one scoop of lasagna has been mined for pasta and cheese, leaving the spinach behind.

Another girl employed a different strategy, using her "spork" to pick out as much of the spinach as she was able, then dumping it on what appear to be strips of roasted sweet potato, which the kids didn't eat either.

The lesson, I think, is that you can make school food a whole lot better and still kids will only eat what immediately appeals to them and throw the rest in the trash. In fact, in my daughter's cafeteria at least, I'd say far more food gets tossed than actually eaten, including most of the vegetables, salads and rice side dishes.

While all of these positive changes to the menu and food preparation took place--including lots of fresh local vegetables and entrees cooked from scratch--there was no one in the cafeteria explaining to the kids what the new food items were.

So much work needs to be done coaching the children on what these unfamiliar foods are and why they should eat them. The quality of food in D.C. schools is astronomically better than the processed convenience foods that were served as recently as a year ago. Yet most of it is going to waste.

There should be adults in the cafeteria sitting with the kids, talking to them about the food, eating alongside them. In our school, teachers merely act as monitors, trying to maintain order. Sometimes I wonder why I am the only parent around at lunch.

Yesterday I got a bit of a shock from the cafeteria manager. She normally gives me a tray of food to photograph, but yesterday she would barely make eye contact and informed me that the only way I would get food was if my daughter, who had brought lunch from home, stood in line and paid for it.

I think the cafeteria manager may be angry about the post I wrote recently on the barbecued chicken. She brought it up with me the other morning, sounding upset that I would criticize the way the chicken was cooked.

What I had tried to convey in that piece was how badly mistaken my daughter was about the palatability of the chicken. She says she doesn't like it because it's either overcooked or covered with too much sauce. I meant to say how far off base she was: the chicken is really good. But I kind of mangled it.

I've since gone back and performed a little re-write to make that more clear.

What's for Lunch: Homemade Lasagna--Hold the Spinach

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Behold the beautiful lasagna "homemade" in the kitchen of my daughter's elementary school here in the District of Columbia by the kitchen manager, affectionately referred to as "Mrs. G."

"Mrs. G" has been working in school kitchens for 23 years and does know a thing or two about making food from scratch, even though that definitely has not been the drill in D.C. schools in recent memory. Since Chartwells took over food service three years ago, she now works for Chartwells.

The lasagna was introduced this year. Lately, I have been eating the food myself. I haven't dared before--there are just too many carbs in school food for me. But in addition to recording what the food looks like and how the kids react to it, I thought it was high time I knew how it tasted as well.

I can now announce: the lasagna is divine. Okay, it's not the lasagna with bechamel sauce I would make at home. This lasagna calls for frozen spinach, prepared tomato sauce, no-boil noodles and commercially grated mozzarella cheese. Still, a superb effort I would say.

The peas, lightly cooked from the frozen state, also were delicious, as was the Caesar salad. It even came with little croutons. The dressing, I'm told, was a "light Italian," not really Caesar. Still, it was dusted with Parmesan cheese.

I can't vouch for the food service all of D.C.'s schools are getting from Chartwells. I'm limited to visiting my daughter's school, and they may be making a special effort there because they read this blog. But some days I am impressed by what the kids are seeing on their trays.

Then I noticed my daughter doing something odd with her spork. She was picking up pieces of the lasagna noodles and scraping at them. Then I realized: she was scraping away all the spinach.

Some adults have this fantasy that if we just give kids real vegetables, they will light up like Christmas trees and eat healthfully ever after. Obviously, adults don't' understand the lengths some kids will go to avoid vegetables and other "healthy" foods.

This reminds me of the story my daughter told last year about what the kids did with the raw cucumber slices that were delivered to their classes as snacks: They liked to stomp on the bags of cukes and "turn them into slush."


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After picking out as much of the noddles and cheese as she could, this was the heap of spinach my daughter left on her tray. "It was just too much spinach," she told me later.

Some of the kids--not many--ate the peas and the salad. But most of this, unfortunately, also wound up in the trash. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is proposing to sharply curtail the use of green peas, potatoes, corn and other "starchy vegetables" in favor of more dark green, orange and red vegetables.

That would mean the sweet potatoes the kids didn't eat on Monday I suppose.

Meet Our Kitchen Staff

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Here are the ladies who prepare the meals at my daughter's elementary school here in the District of Columbia. Last week they asked me if I would like to photograph them for the blog. But yesterday the kitchen manager--the woman on the right, affectionately known as "Mrs. G--said her supervise at Chartwells had instructed not to give their names.

That's a shame, don't you think. These are, after all, the real heroes of the cafeteria, the women who feed and nourish our children. They should be celebrated, not hidden away in anonymity. You know they try to serve the best food they can every day with the resources they have available. They put a lot of pride into their work, and parents should be grateful.

Today's entree was a spinach and cheese salad that "Mrs. G" triumphantly claimed as her own creation. "I told you I made it myself," she insisted. Also on the menu: steamed broccoli and a whole wheat roll.

This is so much better than chicken nuggets, no?

Lasagna: It Really Was Homemade!

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

Recently I inferred that the spinach lasagna in this photo, taken on the second day of school at my daughter's elementary school here in the District of Columbia, was frozen and not "homemade," as Chartwells had indicated on its published menu.

I was wrong. When I walked into the cafeteria yesterday to photograph the food, the kitchen manager gently corrected me. "I made that lasagna," she said proudly.

Well blow me down.

She couldn't tell me whether each and every D.C. school that Chartwells now serves (I believe that would be 108) made its own lasagna that day. But more importantly, the lasagna was not some processed import, frozen and re-heated like most meals from Chartwells in the past. It was made by layering lasagna noodles with tomato sauce, frozen spinach and grated cheese.

As I've been gathering the last two weeks, there's been a real revolution underway in D.C. Public Schools food service. According to Food Services Director Jeffrey Mills, who spent a good part of his summer testing hundreds of alternate menu items, the Chartwells menu has been completely changed. The kitchen crews got extra training over the summer, and now we're seeing lots more freshly prepared foods on kids' cafeteria trays.

In fact, we've been making a big deal about D.C. Central Kitchen's involvement in a pilot program this year, cooking meals from scratch for seven D.C. schools. But here we have the DCPS kitchen staff showing that they can cook from scratch, too.

Congratulations, D.C. kitchen ladies! What's next on the agenda? Homemade soup maybe?

What's for Lunch: Spinach Lasagna

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Pictures of school lunch in the past were usually a horror show. Rarely did you see anything you'd describe as "pretty." But look at this meal served in D.C. schools yesterday. It's obvious that the work our food services staff have been doing the last few months is paying off.

Intead of a desert of browns, we have a symphony of greens. The lasagna is so much more welcome than the re-heated chicken nuggets or "beef crumbles" of the past. (Note to Chartwells menu writers: We know this lasagna isn't "homemade." Please give a real descriptor, like what's in it.)

And look at the salad. Not that factory iceberg from California, but real Romaine lettuce with a creamy dressing. The peas don't look cooked to death, as the broccoli and carrots usually are. And most prominently we have a seasonal peach, and a "local" peach at that. It was picked at Crown Orchards in Batesville, Va., according to the D.C. Public Schools website.

(My daughter reported that what she got with her lunch was a nectarine and it was "great," though still a little hard.)

I'd be very curious to know whether this kind of meal is more expensive than what our schools were serving last year. The "Healthy Schools Act" passed recently by the D.C. Council allots 10 cents more for each breakfast and each lunch served, to be paid from sales taxes on sodas.

Now, not all of the kids were especially taken by the spinach lasagna. One little boy I noticed wouldn't touch it at all because it was "too green." And while the peas looked lovely, only a few of the kids were really digging into them. Vegetable side dishes are a tough sell in a school cafeteria. As much as adults would like kids to eat healthier foods, vegetables and whole grains are their least favorite.

Still, you'd be pressed to find a school meal that looked better than this. The kids were getting an eyeful of what real food made with care should look like. And all the kids were drinking plain milk--no more chocolate or strawberry here.