Today’s menu: chicken teriyaki, rice with peas and egg, carrots, applesauce, breadstick
Chicken patty teriyaki is one of my favorite main dishes. I thought it tasted fine — definitely better than some of the other stuff I have eaten this year. I imagine that this would be one of the more expensive dishes compared to say the hot dog or hamburger meal because it contains more real chicken and there is also egg in the dish, which doesn’t appear in any other lunchtime meal. If you zoom in on the chicken patty, you can see that it contains more actual chicken than any other chicken patty I have eaten. The texture is an interesting mix of real chicken bits and spongy interior (see second close-up).
Today’s carrots tasted more like canned carrots than previous carrots have tasted to me. Because I ate a lot of canned veggies as a kid, I actually find that flavor comforting (oddly, I like the taste of canned peas too…) Mmmm, canned carrots, remind me of home and the 1980s….
I ate the applesauce, but not the breadstick…I know that under the federal guidelines the school district needs to offer two grains per meal, but a breadstick with rice is out of place. I just can’t be persuaded to think otherwise. And I can’t even persuade myself to take a bite of a bread product in a package.
I hope you had a phenomenal Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday because it’s all about food and pretty much non-political. Usually we went to my Great Aunt Alice’s here in Illinois for the holiday with my mom’s side of the family including her favorite first cousin and his partner from San Francisco (how much cooler can you be?). We chatted until our mouths went dry, laughed until our faces hurt from smiling, and ate until our bellies ached.
I had my son more than two years ago and when he was almost two months old, Great Aunt Alice passed away. Thanksgiving had already been planned and plane tickets bought for the holiday but we didn’t know what to do. It wouldn’t be the same with her. Everyone including the Californians decided to go up to Wisconsin and make the best of it. We tried not to cry, but we were choked up pretty frequently. Thankfully my little baby made everyone smile and think of the possibilities of life.
I hope that this past holiday you got the chance to lift your glass to toast the ones you love.
***
A kid was sitting in her chair and said, “Ouch!”
We looked at her alarmed and I asked, “What’s wrong?”
She remarked, “My legs hurt.”
I needed more information, “What happened to your legs?”
She replied with a muted smile, nodding her head, “I ran too much!”
I couldn’t suppress a laugh.
***
A different student who was at another school last year told me, “When I was at X School, they had art class. I liked it. They had recess too. You know what recess is? It’s when you go outside to the park.”
My heart broke.
That a kid thinks he needs to explain to a teacher what recess is…
It makes me crazy.
Oh and yes, there is no art this year. There has been art on and off, but this year it was cut.
That broke a lot of kids’ hearts.
What is an elementary education without art and recess?
(Full disclosure: my mom used to be an art teacher).
***
The Eat Along Challenge (December 6th through December 10th)
Liz Snyder from www.ieatreal.com contacted me about an experiment she tried: The $2 Lunch Challenge, which was picked up by Civil Eats. She wanted to make good food at school lunch prices. So she made a week’s worth of lunches for her daughter at home. Each lunch was full of fresh, organic food for under $2 per lunch (not including labor) and she compared them to what I was eating. What a contrast!
Next week I’m challenging you to pack a cheap, fresh lunch Monday through Friday, photograph it, and blog it and then link it up to my daily lunch posts all week. If you feel like you have the time to do a cost calc on each lunch, then go for it. I bet you can make it for under $2 just like Liz. As a teacher I pay $3 per lunch, but that is more than the federal reimbursement rate of $2.74 (at my school). If you don’t have time to do the math (maybe you have a screaming toddler like I do), don’t fret — just link up your child’s lunch. Let’s have fun with this!