Students at Hamilton Southeastern Schools will see fresher, made-from-scratch meals when school starts Aug. 7, part of the district’s ongoing effort to offer diverse and healthy food options to its more than 21,000 students.
“Our goal, because we are in education, is to educate students and introduce them to different foods,” HSE Director of Food Services Karen Ogden said. “Last year, we started our global meals, which we do monthly. We (pick) different regions and prepare a meal that (we) serve to the students. We also started our Harvest of the Month, introducing them to — whether it’s corn or watermelon, let’s say — and maybe it’s prepared a different way for them to taste or try.”
The district’s kitchens have made tikka masala, Caribbean black beans and rice and roasted jicama, to name a few items.
To help food service managers and kitchen staff learn more about preparing that kind of food and other fresh options, HSE hosted a training in late June — Culinary Skills for A+ School Meals, a weeklong workshop sponsored by the Indiana Department of Education.
Catering Manager Amy Reade attended the training. She was one of about 10 HSE Schools staff members there but said there was a total of 30 participants from several districts.
“It was awesome,” she said. “It was very eye opening. It was fun to learn how to make scratch food in our four walls. I hope that we continue to move toward more of a scratch kitchen.”
A scratch kitchen is one where the food is prepared and cooked on-site. That’s challenging for a school kitchen that must produce food in large volumes, but Reade said they learned methods to do more preparation ahead of time and make sure everything is ready when hungry kids show up.
She said they will start making small changes right away while working toward a larger shift.
“Some of the things that we made during this (training) would probably be too complicated for us to do in our four walls at this time,” she said. “But there are little things, like dressings, that we could make very easily in our cafeterias that taste so much better than the low-sodium ones that we’re getting in now.”
The training had different themes each day, Reade said, such as a grains day, salad day and sandwich day.
“The sandwiches — that was probably the best day, because there were just so many different sandwiches,” she said. “The Caprese sandwich was probably my favorite. But then there was a po’boy, a tofu one that was good — and I’m not a tofu person.”
Reade said the training also covered different cooking techniques, adding spices to improve flavor and presentation — because if it looks good, the kids are more likely to try it.
“It was fun to learn, but it was also fun to be with the managers in our district and see how excited they were about this,” she said. “We broke into, I think, eight different groups every day and had four to six different items to make each. Then we would all eat lunch together, and that was our lunch.”
And, she said, the kids will benefit — which is the ultimate goal.
“Different meals that taste better and are made with love,” Reade said. “It’s not just heating stuff up.”
Odgen agreed and added that it’s beneficial to introduce children to different types of food and ways of cooking. She said younger kids, especially, are open to trying new things. Food also can help foster understanding of different cultures.
Ogden noted that there are more than 100 languages spoken in the district. Kitchen managers try to find something they can prepare to represent some of the major regions represented within the student body, she said, and the more popular items — like ramen bowls — have been incorporated into the regular meal rotation.
A little more than half of the district’s students regularly eat a meal for breakfast and/or lunch at school. Others either bring their lunch or buy pizza, for example, which doesn’t count as a meal by federal guidelines. About 25 percent of the student population qualifies for free or reduced-price lunches, which Ogden said is lower than average, but has grown in the last few years.
For more about the state culinary training program, visit facebook.com/K12culinaryskills.
Healthy school meals
School meals have changed over the decades with more of a focus on health and taste. The June culinary training at Hamilton Southeastern Schools included recipes tailor-made for school districts, following federal nutrition guidelines.
The trainer, Chef Samantha Cowens-Gasbarro, works with Healthy School Recipes, an organization that specializes in K-12 nutrition. The organization’s website has numerous recipes for serving large numbers of students.
One example is a bibimbap bowl recipe that serves 50. The Korean-inspired dish has brown rice, tofu, edamame, carrots, cucumbers, sauces and spices. Notes at the end of the recipe help kitchen managers know how well the meal fits federal regulations for grain, protein and vegetable servings; and includes other nutrition information, such as calories, fat and sodium.
For more, visit healthyschoolrecipes.com.
