What's for Lunch: Turkey Barbecue

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

My first thought about this meal was that it seemed a bit odd to serve the turkey equivalent of classic pulled pork barbecue as a big blob on a Styrofoam tray. It wouldn't be served this way in any barbecue joint I know of. The meat would be on a bun, served as a sandwich.

The kids I think were put off by this strange looking brown heap and consequently barely touched it, even though it was quite good. It was prepared from seasoned turkey breasts that arrives at the school kitchen pre-cooked and frozen. One of the cook's then tore it into to shreds and mixed it with barbecue sauce, as you see here. Instead of being a sandwich, a roll was served on the side. The kids didn't eat it either.

In fact, the barbecue was quite good. Otherwise, this meal contains a deceptive amount of sugar--it's in the barbecue sauce, in the baked beans, and in the commercial cole slaw. This was another instance where the kids seemed to be fine with the idea of not eating very much lunch at all.

Just to be sure, I took a walk around the lunchroom and saw that while a few of the kids dug into the barbecue, or picked at the beans, this food went mostly uneaten. It just got dumped in the trash.

Could it be that the national lunch program's one-size-fits-all approach to loading kids up with every food group every day is just wrong? Is it possible that kids could get by with lots less food, saving tons of money?

Oh, and that price lookup sticker on the pear is hard to miss. It says the pear came from Argentina.

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What's for Lunch: Turkey Sandwich

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

People wonder why schools go to all the trouble trying to make a different hot lunch every day. Can't kids just eat sandwiches? Peanut butter and jelly put me through school for years.

Well, this is a blast from the past: a turkey sandwich on "whole wheat" bread. But this was an alternate selection to the hot entree, which was chicken.

The alternates--a different one for each day of the week--are often quite tempting. You just don't see kids choosing them much, except on this particular day when they seemed to like the looks of this sandwich. At the Chartwell's menu website, it was advertised as a "turkey and cheese whole wheat wrap." I'm guessing they ran out of the whole wheat flour tortillas the kitchen normally uses to make those wraps.

And just in case there might be any shortage of carbs on this tray, one of the side dishes is a big scoop of rice. Looks like some broccoli in another corner.




Here's what the sandwich look like after it emerged from the plastic. I would have made mine slathered with mayonnaise. Still, it looks good enough to eat.

What's for Lunch: Cubano Turkey Sandwich?

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook



A traditional "Cuban" sandwich is made with roast pork, ham, Swiss cheese, pickle and maybe some yellow mustard all squished together on a special griddle between two slices of Cuban bread.



Chartwells was advertising what you see here as a "turkey Cubano." I thought it looked--and tasted--more like pulled pork without the barbecue. For some reason, many of the kids rejected the cheese.


Here's a closeup of the sandwich. It's made from a pre-seasoned, roasted turkey breast that the kitchen manager chopped into small pieces, much as you would do with pulled pork.



The aroma was not so appetizing. But the flavor of the sandwich, built with two slices of "whole wheat" hamburger bun, was not so bad. I might have exchanged the cheese for some barbecue sauce.





This is what it looked like when you removed the top.

And here's the meat revealed after peeling back the cheese.

Kids seemed to like the beans, the spinach salad not so much.

What's for Lunch: Taco Salad

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

I bicycled the 3.25 miles to my daughter's elementary school yesterday. The thermometer read 35 degrees. Most of that trip is uphill getting to the school from our house. So I was a bit ravenous by the time I arrived in the cafeteria.

This "taco salad" looked awfully good to me. Tasted good, too.

Okay, so the meat is highly processed turkey, probably with some soy protein mixed in. It arrived frozen. And the "baked whole grain tortilla shells" Chartwells advertised on its menu site are nothing more than those "scoops" you see in the corn chip aisle in the supermarket.

But I liked some of the touches. For instance, the lettuce confetti at the bottom of the heap, though it is already prepared and bagged for convenience, got a splash of lemon juice from our lunch ladies to boost the flavor. Underneath the shredded cheese is a "southwest peach salsa" that was pretty tasty also.

And in the upper-left hand corner is something I have not seen before: a dessert crumble made with canned pear and peaches and frozen blueberries also made in the local kitchen. It wasn't terribly sugary. I think it hit a lot of positive notes.

Is this a good way to deliver those anti-oxidants in the blueberries? Or should the schools not be tempting kids at all with dessert?

The plastic cup contains ranch dressing, to be drizzled over the taco salad. I spent my lunch hour
spooning the salad into the corn scoops individually, adding a little dollop of dressing. I noticed some of the kids doing the same. What fun.

What's for Breakfast: Turkey Sausage Muffin

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Since my daughter transferred to a different elementary school this year, I've had a much tougher time getting my hands on ingredient information for the meals. Typically they're pasted onto the shipping boxes that the frozen meal components arrive in. It was pretty easy to dive into the dumpster outside the school and retrieve them. I saved a whole box full at home, giving me a reference to use in these posts.

Under the "Healthy Schools Act" approved last spring by the D.C. Council, the public schools were required to post meal ingredients where the public could easily see them. School officials said the ingredients would be part of a new website. When the website did not appear for the beginning of school in the fall, school officials said it would be ready sometime in November. Now it's January, a new year is upon us, and still no website, still no ingredient information.

Thus, I regret I cannot tell you what is in this turkey sausage. Presumably its turkey and a number of additives to make it taste like sausage, processed in some distant food factory and shipped to the District of Columbia to be re-heated in the school's steamer or convection oven.

The most unfortunate part is the cheese, which is sprinkled onto the muffin than melted. It doesn't look especially appetizing, does it?

What's for Lunch: Thansgiving turkey

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

When they said they were roasting turkey at my daughter's elementary school here in the District of Columbia, I was already to station myself in the kitchen and photograph the bird coming out of the oven.

Of course, nothing so dramatic took place. The "turkey" was actually several five-pound processed turkey rolls. The kitchen staff roasted them in the oven alright, a couple days in advance. Then they sliced the rolls on a Hobart deli-style machine. (Have I mentioned that our kitchen is fully equipped?)

But, oh, what a glorious meal it was. Maybe not exactly like grandma's. But the gravy was made from scratch using the turkey drippings. You'd never guess the biscuit arrived as a frozen piece of dough. The mashed potatoes were really mashed potatoes.

There was cranberry dressing and apple sauce.

Can I just register one small complaint about the "crunchy" spinach? Since when do we eat cooked spinach cold?


I took a series of photos and I know the lunch ladies, who recently have been reduced from three to two, are anxious to see them.

So here they are.

What's for Lunch: Bean Taco

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Chartwells calls this "vegetarian Baja bean whole wheat soft taco." Quite a mouthful. It looks like canned black beans and frozen corn with lettuce, topped with a tomato sauce or salsa. It was served open faced with a choice of "Tex-Mex corn" and a "pineapple cup." Or, in this case, pineapple without the cup.

I saw very few kids actually choose this lunch. Most of them were taking the Tuesday alternate: "turkey and cheese whole grain wrap." Meaning, there was a choice of tortilla two different ways.


One fifth-grade girl wanted nothing to do with the tortilla. She emptied out the contents--turkey, tomato, lettuce, grated cheddar cheese--and was tossing it around to make a salad.

This poses its own challenges, since the processed turkey meat, cut into deli-style rounds, does not lend itself to being cut with a plastic "spork."