Comfort Food...

Today we are making a favorite of every adult, Chicken and Noodles!  Home made.  The girls are gathering up all the items needed to make a batch for 300!!!!  That is a lot of noodles.  Here is the Tilt Skillet that we use to make the recipe in.  Then we use cases of Reams frozen egg noodles.  The Skillets lets us make 200 servings at a time.  But it is a pain to clean. 

While this is going on we also put together the salad bar, and someone is washing tons of fruit for the students.  We balance a meal like this with veggies and a variety of fresh fruit for them to choose from.  We also believe in a bit of bribery and offer them a 3oz ice cream sandwich.

So we have a full day....lots going on in order to get everyone fed.  Our soup today is our very own Chicken Tortilla Soup, the recipe follows.


Chicken Tortilla Soup
6 servings

1/4 c olive oil
4 cloves of garlic minced
1 cup of onion finely diced

2 32 oz boxes of Swanson Chicken
2 cans of tomatoes with green chilies
1-2 T. cumin
1 t. oregano
Kosher salt and fresh cracked pepper to taste
4 c cooked diced chicken (a lot of times I will use a rotisserie chicken from Sams)

Optional toppings: sour cream, diced avocado, lime wedges, taco chips, snipped cilantro
I have also served this with a mound of cooked white rice in the middle of the bowl and ladle the soup over the top.


In a large soup pot heat the olive oil and add your diced onions.  Cook till soft then add the garlic; continue cooking for another minute or so.
Add the chicken broth, tomatoes and heat to a bubble.  Add the spices, salt and pepper; taste and adjust seasoning.
Add the chicken and bring back up to a bubble.
Serve with anything you want.

I will make crispy tortilla strips also, take a corn or flour tortilla and cut the rounds into strips, drop them into a skillet with hot oil and cook till crunchy.  Drain on a paper towel and then serve them on top of the soup.  Yummy!


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Thank you...

To all the moms and dads, and grandmas and grandpas that came to our Valentine Lunch yesterday.  Wow...we never expected the response we got and we are so happy that you came.  You got to see "the lunch ladies" and go through the line, you got see how your child gets lunch and all the options in front of them. To you we are no longer a mystery, we have names and faces.  We know your child by name, we know what they like for lunch.  You have encouraged us greatly by coming.

Now for the nuts and bolts of yesterday.  Making home made lasagna for 400 hundred can be a bit daunting.  But we had our recipe in hand (for 100 servings) and made four batches and set up our assembly line.  We sauced, laid pasta sheets, more sauce and cheese and repeated.  Then foiled each full pan  (16 full size 2 inch steam table pans) and cooked them in groups of 8.  They took a bit longer to bake, and there was a bit of a moment there where we wondered if we were gong to get them out on time, but we did!  And they tasted great.

Earlier in the morning (our's starts at 7:00 am) J.G. made the cherry crisp....it was the star of the show!

We also made a Basil Tomato Soup that was so simple, and yet so good!

So as sore as we are today, and boy are we, it was a great success!!!  We got to see parents we have never seen and the students loved having their parents eat lunch with them.  So a big thank you to the parents and my big thank you to my ladies who worked incredibly hard to put this lunch together.


Tomato Basil Soup

1/4 c olive oil
1 onion finely diced

2 cans (28 oz) or 4 cans of the 15 oz of whole tomatoes with basil and garlic.  If you can find San Marzano tomato even better.
1 small package of fresh basil, with the leaves torn up into small pieces

1 garlic clove smashed and minced
2-3 c of half & half
Kosher salt and fresh cracked pepper to taste
1-2 t sugar-this helps with acidity of the tomatoes, don't leave it out

In a large soup pot add your olive oil and allow it to come to a shimmer....add your onions and cook until soft and translucent. Add the tomatoes and let this simmer for 30-45 minutes on low heat.  This allows the tomatoes to fall apart a bit and some of the water to cook off.

Add the remaining ingredients to the pot and using a stick blender whiz it into a smooth south.  Let it heat up again and taste.  Adjust seasoning.

Serve in deep bowls with curls of fresh Parmesan on top and grilled cheese sandwiches.

Valentine Day...

Tomorrow is a new venture for us in the kitchen, we are making home made lasanga for 300+.  We are also making cherry crisp, and we made the topping ourselves.  No mixes, and no chemicals.  How did this crazy thing begin....


Last month while I was making up the menu for Feb. I came across Tuesday the 14th; what to do, if anything?  Will my ladies still work for me after I tell them about this?  The answer to that is we are doing something and my ladies did stay on the job.  So then I had the brilliant idea to invite the parents, I asked my ladies if that sounded like a good idea, they were enthusiastic, so here we go. 


 
Menu:  Home Made Lasagna
Italian Garden Salad with grape tomatoes, croutons and shaved Parmesan cheese
Garlic Bread Sticks
Home Made Cherry Crisp
Variety of fresh fruit


I hope that with having the parents there, the students will at least try the lasagna.  It is not fancy or filled with strange things; pasta, spaghetti sauce, mozzarella cheese. 

 Now for the funny part; imagine 6 middle age ladies (some more middle then others) lining up to make an assembly line to build the lasagna.  We have never made this dish, but we have made the parts, we know serving it will be a bit of a challenge.  Rarely does lasagna come out of the pan it was cooked in willingly or intact.  We have over 60 parents coming, this always creates a certain measure of chaos.  So here we are getting mentally ready to pull this off.

I will take pictures tomorrow and document our fist Valentine Lunch Event.

Friday...

Finally!  This has been a very long week.  We had two of our ladies here in the kitchen out sick, one them is out again today.  This upper respiratory crud is cruel and wicked.  It is also so cold out.  Winter is still here.

Today we are serving personal pan pizza, they are a round, thick crust pizza with a little smattering of cheese. These are not a favorite of ours, but the kids love them and therefore they pay the bills, slowly.  We are also serving lots of veggies and fresh fruits, they eat the fruit.....

Making lunch for a group of students that they will eat and parents will pay for is far harder than either group can imagine.  Then you add the government into the soup and it makes for strange bedfellows.

I agree with a lot of what the lunch advocates are arguing for.  We need to prepare better lunches for those students who are in at-risk areas.  But fixing them better lunches does not fix them.  They are still in an at-risk area that the all mighty government can not reach, nor should they.  The government is not the answer to a societal problems, we are.  Big answer for a huge problem.  But if we don't take responsibility and require more from ourselves, the government is going to continue to throw little good money after big "our" money.  We will all be in the same boat because we are literally taxed to death.

I have no simple answer for the vast problems of the world except one word...self-responsibility.  Having ownership in our own lives.  An entire generation, regardless of economic status, has no sense of how to take care of themselves.  They truly believe that the cradle to grave mentality is the right one.  In order for evil to succeed, good men need to do nothing.

So with that said back to the school lunches.  We need to do the best we can, but we also have a bottom line.  So a balance must be hit upon.  This last Tuesday we made from scratch Chicken Pot Pie filling and served it with biscuits.  My numbers for the that dish dropped like Megatron went into the sea.  Hard and fast.  But we had 99 kids get pb&j, chicken noodle soup or a chef salad instead of the main item.  So tell me who is wagging whom?  We can not get your child to eat a meal that they have never had.  We can not convince them that peas are yummy when they pick them out or refuse the dish every where else.  I know because I have a super picky eater who can pick out microscopic onions pieces out of any dish, she is now 18 and does this better than ever.

So I do understand, but please do not hold the local lunch service to a higher standard than they have else where.  If I had to do it all over again, I would never have taken my kids to fast food places.  I would have spent more time training their palate then I did.  They would no doubt still be picky, but maybe a little less picky.

So toady we serve Personal Pan Pizza with a large romaine salad filled with grape tomatoes and home style croutons, garlic bread sticks and a variety of fresh fruit.  We make our own ranch to keep the chemicals down in the mix and they love it.  They will without ceremony pitch the salad and about half will eat the a fruit.  We keep trying though.

Yesterday we made Pulled Pork Sandwiches on a whole wheat bread.  It was yummy and they ate this. Here is the simple simple recipe:

1 Boston Butt Roast with the bone in
2 T. kosher salt
2 T. fresh cracked pepper
2 T. liquid Smoke
1 cooking bag

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees for 20 minutes before cooking

Rinse the roast off and pat dry with a paper towel
Rub the salt & pepper into the roast, at this point if you wanted you could place the roast in the fridge and let it sit overnight, or not.

Place the roast in the bag and then in a deep large oven proofed pan, no lid needed.
Put the roast in the oven and turn the heat down to 300.  Roast for 4-6 hours depending on the size of meat.  When the meat falls off the bone it is done.
Remove and let it all rest for about 20 minutes.  Remove the pork from the bag and pull the meat with two forks.  I like to add some more salt and liquid smoke to the pulled meat, but that is up to you.
Serve with warmed corn tortillas, lettuce, diced tomatoes and lime wedges.





A great Sunday meal.