GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — Diana Tarasiewicz’s clientele in the past ranged from those seeking elegant, multi-course dinners with wine pairings to themed events. She’s an award-winning chef, a culinary instructor with more than 25 years of experience who ran her own catering company famous for world cuisine. She can handle everything from a Bridezilla obsessing over hors d’oeuvres to gourmet food for hundreds of guests.
But those clients can’t hold a carrot stick to the toughest critics in her current job as a district manager for School District 51’s Nutrition Services.
Tailoring menus to appeal to the palates of kindergartners through high school seniors is challenging, to say the least. Add the complexity of adhering to federal nutritional standards — including low sodium and whole-grains rules — and a meager budget, and that’s the recipe for what the folks who feed more than 9,000 kids on average in District 51 deal with every day.
MAKING LUNCH HEALTHIER
As a child growing up in Toul, a small town in France’s Alsace-Lorraine region, Tarasiewicz was exposed to a wide variety of foods. She tried escargot at age 5 and loved it. She ate from her godmother’s garden and felt a strong connection to fresh food, and practiced farm-to-table living before it was a buzzword in the culinary world. Today, she’s tasked with helping the district transition to a menu featuring more fresh foods, meals made from scratch while appealing to youngsters’ palates that are more accustomed to Kraft Easy Mac n’ Cheese and Lunchables than healthy, fresh foods.
“Cooking for kids, for me, is much more of a challenge than cooking for adults,” Tarasiewicz said.
Dealing with children’s expectations about how food should appear and their preferences for certain textures has been challenging. Sometimes, the exact same ingredients presented in a different format can be the difference between kids liking a dish or refusing to eat it.
Take, for example, the district’s lasagna. It’s made with marinara sauce that’s chock-full of vegetables, chopped and simmered down in 30-gallon batches, then pureed with an immersion blender and frozen, awaiting its destiny as the cornerstone of one of six different recipes. The kitchen staff calls it the “mother sauce.”
The lasagna, made with the marinara, noodles, meat crumbles and cheese, wasn’t popular with the kids.
“Mostly at the elementary level, the kitchen managers would say it’s not something the kids are used to eating at home,” Tarasiewicz said.
So they tweaked the recipe and made it a one-pot meal instead of a labor-intensive, layered dish. Luigi’s Cheesy Noodles are the result, with whole-grain elbow macaroni substituting for lasagna noodles.
Another dish, the macaroni and cheese, needed to appear more like a boxed convenience food from a grocery store to appeal to students. To achieve the signature school bus orange-colored sauce, Tarasiewicz used something from her arsenal of spices to boost the coloring and cover up the dark, whole-grain pasta. Simply making the sauce with a little achiote, a Latin American spice, did the trick.
What kids eat at home is often what Tarasiewicz tries to keep in mind when adapting recipes for student palates. While she can’t change what kids eat outside of school, or the sodium or fat limits imposed by U.S. Department of Agriculture rules, she has other tricks up her sleeve.
“What I’m trying to do is make the food taste better with the use of herbs and spices without adding salt,” she said.
Kitchen managers now make all their own spice blends and salad dressings, to avoid additional sodium.
TRAINING, TOOLS FOR STAFF
Tarasiewicz joined the district as part of a department reorganization headed by Nutrition Services Director Dan Sharp three years ago. For the district to break away from menus riddled with heat-and-serve, convenience foods manufactured elsewhere, he needed to give kitchen staff the proper training, the correct tools and a vision of what it’s like to be a chef, not the stereotypical lunch lady. He hired three district managers, including Tarasiewicz, to coach and support kitchen staff as they retooled the menus and transitioned to a scratch-cooking model.
Together, the district managers coach kitchen staff at 37 schools on the details of implementing the new cooking methods and executing the recipes.
Before the change, the district was at the height of what Sharp calls the “ballpark menu,” meaning it was mostly heat-and-serve, pre-packaged foods you would expect at a baseball game. Trays were loaded with fries, nachos, tater tots, hot dogs, hamburgers and pizza. Before school nutrition rules were revamped in accordance with recommendations from the Institute of Health, there were no limits on trans-fats or sodium. Moving away from that model has been a long and difficult process.
“It’s about working harder and smarter,” Sharp said.
Time management, engineering menus carefully and the execution of the new recipes is still a daily challenge.
Since making the commitment to moving away from cooking with box cutters toward providing from-scratch meals, there have been some growing pains. The transition has required adjustment in staff training, equipment and budgets. Providing more fresh fruits and vegetables for students has cost more money — this year the budget for produce increased by $200,000. That’s 3.5 percent of the district’s annual food costs.
Through the Colorado Health Foundation and LiveWell Colorado, Sharp has acquired $265,000 in equipment needed for meal preparation, such as food processors and blenders to chop vegetables and hide the nutritious bits in the sauces, something he calls “stealth health.” Grant funding also funded training for staffers who are still adjusting to cooking with whole, fresh foods.
LARGE AMOUNT OF WASTE
The one area the district has no control over is the finicky palates of its customers — the students. Although they can provide fresh ingredients, the whole grain breads and pasta, and the roasted vegetables, they can’t make kids eat them.
And in the end, the evidence of how well it’s going over is in the bags of garbage that custodians haul to the Dumpster out back.
Dos Rios Elementary School Lead Custodian Mark Greenlee knows exactly what’s popular for lunch and what items are duds. On days when the cafeteria serves hot dogs, Greenlee notices a dramatic reduction in the amount of trash he deals with.
Greenlee has noticed an increase in the amount of food waste since the federal lunch reforms and the district decided to move toward a scratch-cooking model. He’s not impressed.
“I get the health-kick stuff,” he said. “They’ve changed the menu to give nutritious foods to kids, but in the process they’ve created food kids don’t like.”