Edible Education: Slicing up Inspiration for Your Menu and More!
Prioritize versatility in your menu planning. Streamline your center of the plate items to use one protein multiple ways. Get creative with base salads that can be used each day with leftovers from the previous day such as: taco salads, Asian salads, or buffalo chicken salads. Hamburgers need not just be served on a bun, but can be ‘deconstructed’ into a burger salad or rice bowl that kids will love. Getting the most out of your commodities while boosting the flavors on your plate can help diversify your menu without bogging down your inventory or loading your dumpster. Offer choice. We know that when students are given choices to select what foods go on their lunch trays they are much more likely to consume the food. Bar concepts and ‘Build-a-Meal’ offerings give students the opportunity to select from options and choose what they are most likely to eat. Utilize production records and forecasting. The tool of our trade extraordinaire is the production record. If it is done well, it holds the power to minimize time and overproduction while maximizing efficiency in the back of the house.Ordering“light”and using FIFO (first in first out) are great ways to keep the inventory flowing out onto the tray vs. into the garbage. Have time to “dig deeper” with a little spring cleaning? Use this Cafeteria Waste Reduction assessment to help you not only tighten up your waste but SAVE money too. Get creative with your leftovers. My father-in-law says I can take Thanksgiving leftovers and make them into a banquet! With a little planning and effort, using your leftovers doesn’t have to look and feel like yesterday’s cast offs. Create new and exciting dishes that keep everyone excited and even looking forward to what’s for lunch. Leftover chicken and veggies can be used to create this Thai Shaker Spaghetti Salad or this Yakisoba Noodle Salad - swap out with various leftover veggies or chicken types…it doesn’t matter. Find ways to use even imperfect produce. Even produce that is blemished, bruised, or getting past its prime can find a place on your menu. Cherry tomatoes that are getting too soft for eating fresh can be roasted and tossed in a pasta. Bananas that are getting brown spots can be frozen and used later
in smoothies, or sliced and mixed with commodity strawberries (secret: the strawberry juice masks the brown spots).
Buy in season and local when you can for superb taste and shelf life.
Pisanick Partners
Tina Hastings Maureen Pisanick, RDN-LDN &
Regional supports that connect cafeterias to local buying cooperatives can help partner regional scale while securing a competitive price. Investigate and build connections in your neck of the woods for growing economies of scale and support near you!
Waste Not Want Not. Looking for a little inspiration to help boost your menu cycle into the new year? Welcome to our column featuring bites of nutrition knowledge and insight for your team’s menu creation needs. Here you can digest four menu recipe categories to customize, create and expand your cycle for improved customer satisfaction. How about an easy to use cookbook with “Harvest of the Month”, “Simply Fresh”, “Global Trends’’, and “Comfort Classic” recipes to fill your team’s idea basket? These recipes are sure to help inspire dishes that students will love and can easily be created in your kitchens to increase participation.
Train your staff and optimize your fresh produce with quick bites of education.
Knowing how to properly freeze excess produce that isn’t utilized before it spoils and results in wasted food and money can be a valuable skill. Wilted celery and carrots past their prime can be diced and frozen to be re-purposed later for soups and sauces.
Minimize Waste Through Caring and Sharing
Don’t get overwhelmed - get inspired!
Engage all stakeholders. Hone the passions of your environmentally conscious students and parent groups by having proactive conversations to build a village of support for minimizing waste in your community. Think about ways to work together and keep the responsibility of stewardship a team effort! Utilize share tables. We love these ready resources for stopping waste with share table training videos and guides! Consider donating. USDA does not prohibit Child Nutrition program operators from donating leftovers. Check with your local health department for specifics on how food must be handled to be donated. If food waste is an issue in your cafeteria, start with one or two of these strategies to tackle the problem. School food service programs have an obligation to be good stewards of the resources under our umbrellas and reduce our contribution to the 30-40% of food that is wasted in the United States each year.
In this edition we’ll focus on minimizing food waste to not only sustain the earth but your program as well! There are several steps that can be taken throughout the purchasing, preparation and serving process that can help control food loss. Even in our own homes we see wonderful foods “go bad” or that are wasted due to poor planning, preparation and organization. Contemplate how your kitchen stacks up in these strategies to help prevent food waste.
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Minimize Waste Through Purchasing and Menu Planning
Use a well planned shopping list. ‘Don’t shop when you’re hungry’ is a bit of personal advice. You might find you overload your cart with items just because everything looks good when you’re starved! This same phenomenon can happen if you place unnecessary orders without having a well planned menu, an accurate sense of current inventory, a plan for use of commodities, space, and organization in your storage areas! Here’s a look at one of our shopping lists that is created with USDA software it generates the list directly from recipes on the menu using distributor coded ingredients for ease of placing orders. This ensures that ONLY items that will be used on the menu are purchased.
Pisanick Partners is a nutrition and operations based consulting firm with decades of experience in Child Nutrition. We have refined our approach through creation of cycle menus, training and development of staff, and implementing strategies that take on the task of not only attaining nutritional excellence, but also financial success in the K-12 environment. Our experience not only supports a school district in meeting all state and federal mandates for implementing the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs, but also the menu creation with an eye for detail and meticulous organization. The objective is to quickly and accurately evaluate, analyze and organize a district’s nutritional program to insure compliance and easy on-going maintenance.
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