What's for Breakfast: Waffles? Pancakes?

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Kids got a choice of waffles or pancakes on this particular morning. In fact, unless my eyes deceived, it looked like there were two varieties of pancakes on display: whole wheat and regular.

These are prepared convenience foods that arrive at the school frozen and are then warmed in a steamer. The waffles typically are a little too crunchy for my taste.


The schools used to serve pancakes and waffles with high-fructose corn syrup masquerading as maple syrup. Now they get a pool of yogurt on their waffle--or to dip their pancake in, as the case might be.

Notice the plain milk. D.C. public schools no longer serve flavored milk.

What's for Breakfast: Finger Food

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

One of the more amusing (or not) aspects of school meals is watching kids try to cope with actually eating the foods they are served with the available plastic cutlery, which does not include either a knife or a fork.

Using their "spork"--or combination spoon and fork--kids often will attempt to shovel unwieldy foods directly into their mouth. But just as often they dispense with the niceties of cutlery altogether and just go at food with their hands.

I've seen them scoop up mashed potatoes with their hands and plaster it on so-called Salisbury steak. I've seen them pick the noodles and cheese out of their spinach lasagna and eat it with their fingers. This morning, they were devising ways to consume a crusty waffle (reheated from frozen) and breakfast patty of turkey sausage.

As you can see in the above photo, one girl's solution was to make a kind of sandwich out of the waffle and the sausage. She proceeded to munch away at the waffle until it matched up perfectly with the sausage.


The brown stuff in the lower left was advertised at the Chartwells website as a "warm cinnamon apple topping" for the waffle. But I did not see any kids deploying it as such. Mostly it went uneaten and was thrown in the trash.

My daughter, who arrived a little later than most of the other kids, waited about 10 minutes for the kitchen to prepare a fresh batch of turkey sausage. But when she tasted it, she threw it back onto the tray. "That's nasty," she said.

This highly processed patty is colored to look like a traditional pork sausage, but the flavor is entirely missing. In fact, it is somewhat over seasoned with red pepper flakes, but otherwise is totally bland, as if it hadn't been salted at all. So between the soggy cardboard-like texture and spicy flavorlessness, this sausage is a turnoff. Although I must say most of the kids ate it anyway and went back for seconds.

What's for Breakfast: Waffles with Yogurt Dip

By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook

Here's breakfast in shades of brown. At it's menu website, Chartwells was calling this "warm whole grain waffle with organic cinnamon vanilla dipping sauce." The "dipping sauce" is Stonyfield vanilla yogurt seasoned with powdered cinnamon. Well, that's got to be better than the high-fructose corn syrup they used to serve with the frozen waffles, right?

The canned apple sauce to my taste buds was unsweetened and also flavored with cinnamon. To wash it all down, orange juice. Still, for calories, this breakfast is highly reliant on sugar to go with a lot of carbs. But the kids like it--especially the waffles, the apple sauce and the juice. Kids like anything sweet and bread-like.

What's for Breakfast: Waffle with Blueberries

By Ed Bruske

aka The Slow Cook

The menu posted by Chartwells on its website called this "warm whole grain waffles with organic yogurt dipping sauce." It also called for a "locally grown peach" and apple juice.

As you can see, the waffle is dressed with yogurt and blueberries, no "dipping sauce" involved. I was told in the cafeteria that this is the same raspberry yogurt served on a fairly regular basis. And as best as I can determine from the package, there is no indication that it is "organic." I'm quite sure it would not be organic, since organic dairy is not at all easy to come by and the second ingredient in this yogurt is cane sugar.

Nevertheless, this is quite a departure from waffles served in the past with a syrup made of high-fructose corn syrup. And how often do you see whole blueberries--one of the planet's healthiest foods--on an elementary school cafeteria tray?(I don't know if they arrived fresh or frozen.) Other than the really high sugar content of the yogurt--more than in Mountain Dew, ounce for ounce--this seems like a genius way to draw kids into healthier options for breakfast.