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aem aem is offline
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Default School Cafeteria Recipes - Comfort or Discomfort Food?

Rusty wrote:
> I found a website that has USDA school cafeteria recipes. Remember
> school cafeteria carrot-raisin salad, cornbread, chili, pizza? In some
> cases it was comfort food and in others it was discomfort food. Some of
> the recipes look better than when I was in elementary school mumble
> years ago. [snip]


When I was in high school I worked for two years in the kitchen that
served the elementary and high school cafeteria. The menus started out
standardized but changed as the school year passed because the
availability of ingredients never kept to the plan. This was a small
isolated town in Alaska with problematic freight deliveries in the
winter. So I learned (by observation) about improvising around set
menus. Looking back at it I remember three lessons learned: the cooks
tasted as they went along, even things they'd made many times before
according to the same recipe; the needs of producing in volume forces
compromises that you have to make the best of -- steam tables are not a
good thing; and practicing knife skills is fun. -aem