Wow, what an accomplishment Colleen!!! Goooood for you!!!!

Do you find it stressful to come up with a healthy menu every day? Heck I find it hard to think of something for 2 people, not cooking for hundreds. :-)

Impressive!!!

Any job can be dull and tiresome...you grabbed a challenge and made a difference! Working a bit harder to make a difference is rewarding. Good for you! What a nice story you shared. : )

Oh, you do my heart good! Our schools used to to be very fine and well run, including with well prepared hot meals daily. Then they were okay, with okay hot meals. Now they're better than nothing with better than nothing meals (and most of the ones who eat the meals would have nothing if it weren't for school meals). There are lots of well intentioned directives to have more nutritious food, but they don't bring in the people who really know how to cook!

You are a blessing to those kids, not only for bringing them good food, but for taking on the advertising and promotion to get them in to eat it!

You are the Hometown Hero! What a challenge you had and met; that's got to give you so much satisfaction.

This is so nice to hear, you are a big part of that success, good for you !!!!

You go, Colleen!! Of course, I'm not surprised, my girls nearly always chose to eat at home when given that choice over fast food or restaurant food. Add a nice, friendly, warm environment and it's like drawing moths to a light. Some of these kids don't just need a meal, they need a warm and inviting place to be, with friendly faces and accepting people. I think you've given them both.

Annie

It's so refreshing to read a story like this-such an upper! It sounds like you have put a lot of thought and effort into this venture and love what you are doing. You not only can cook, but do a great job of marketing, too. The tastings are a clever idea! How fortunate the kids are-just wish all schools had someone like you. Enjoy the sunshine!

Good for you! I wish our school district had someone like you. A couple of years ago we partnered with them to bring their free lunch program to our summer reading program and the food was so horrible, the kids wouldn't eat it. Most of it went into the trash and we couldn't donate the refused lunches to the food bank or the women's shelter or the homeless kids that live under a bridge...it all had to be thrown away. Even the unopened milk. Which is probably good, because I was suspect of their safe food handling procedures. Now we have a local bistro prepare healthy, fresh snacks and the kids inhale them. Some things aren't worth 'free'.

(Chuffed...I love that word!)

Good for you Colleen ...what a great story ! Your life really has had some changes.....but all for the better it sounds.
I have always thought I would like to do something like that since I retired. I do some volunteer work in the grade school serving breakfast to children who don't get one at home. They are little darlings and their smiles are precious. I don't do it as much as I would like......the list of volunteers is quite long...which is a good thing

Keep up the good work and keep us posted.

Thank you for all the good comments and well wishes. We have a basic permanent menu that we take orders for and make extras of the more popular items with different specials every day. Today our specials were hot roast beef and gravy rolls, oven baked potato wedges and porcupine meatballs with tomato gravy and mashed potatoes. Tomorrow is Sloppy Joes (would you believe these are a novelty here?), hot dogs and macaroni cheese. The macaroni cheese was slow to take off until the kids realised it's the same thing as "mac and cheese". These are very culturally impoverished kids in the main and I find it really sad. One student had never heard of or eaten macaroni cheese, one can only despair at what the home diet is...or isn't.
Our hamburgers and chicken burgers are all made from fresh meat (I even grind the chicken myself because it's cheaper), as opposed to the previous manager's bought in patties made of Lord knows what part of the animal (well it claims 100% beef but doesn't say which bit). We buy fresh chickens, boil them and strip the meat off for our chicken and salad sandwiches, hot chicken and mayo rolls and chicken quesadillas (still trying to teach them how to say that one :-) ) instead of buying bags of pre-chopped plastic chicken from the frozen food section like most places do- and it's been noticed :-). We make filled and toasted foccacia sandwiches, pulled pork and coleslaw rolls, lasagne, tacos, pizza, shepherd's pie and in summer our own sushi. Fried rice has been a runaway best seller.
I'm learning a lot of the kids' names because I introduced a Loyalty Card system where they get a dinosaur stamp every time they pre-order their lunch, and after ten stamps they get a free muffin :-) I write their names on the cards and then remember them when I give out the lunches. I'm kind of amazed because usually I have a terrible time remembering faces and names :-) I really enjoy working with the kids and it's not hard to be a smiley Canteen lady most of the time- we have a few students with behaviour issues and I just let them know that if they want to behave badly they can do it somewhere else. I'm pleased to say it stops right away :-) I even get smiles and waves when I'm at the store after school and whispers of "Hey Mum, it's the Canteen lady" which really gives me a boost.
I work hard at promoting the Canteen because we have a really large student body but I'd say maybe only 10% used the Canteen when I started. If we could get more of the students in we could put on more staff and open more serving windows: we have six but only use two (and when I started they only used one and it was so unwelcoming looking). Now we're seeing new faces every day so I'm hoping the word is getting out. Because we're not in the middle of the campus we're easy to overlook and I figured that just sitting back and thinking good thoughts at the kids wasn't going to bring in new customers :-) DH and I brainstorm ideas often. Next week I'm going to run a "Vote for Friday's special" campaign to try to generate some more buzz. This Friday we're having Curry Day with Thai chicken curry and beef curry.
While I do look forward to my time off I'm really enjoying my job and get a lot more satisfaction from it than I have in a while.

Thanks so much for the in depth report! I love reading all the nice things you're feeding the kids. Real food, prepared properly, in forms that appeal to kids, without condescending to them. Great variety! Great promotions!

BTW, I never had macaroni and cheese as a kid at home, and I don't remember having it at a friend's house either. I know you have an underprivileged population, but we were the opposite. Our group just didn't eat a lot of mac and cheese. Or peanut butter and jelly, for that matter, which is an American staple. It might have been exotic to your kid, but he might have something he normally eats at home that's exotic to others. We had borekes. :)

Oh I wish I could bring you in to speak to our school district. Our lunches were: French bread, halved, covered with fake cheese, broiled, then wrapped in foil...to be eaten cold three hours later (yes we had coolers). Some sort of round, crustless, pressed peanut and butter & jelly sandwiches. Bologna and mustard on white bread. "Baby" carrots with kind of white patches and they were bitter. Raisins, but they were rolled in some kind of sour lemon candy powder.

To be fair, it had to be a cold lunch...but...euw.

Wasn't there a tv show a few years ago with Jamie Oliver? He got schools to make real food? You could have been famous, lol.

KatieC, our school had hot dogs that they boiled in an aluminum pot so they were always green, something they called "pizza sticks", which is like a giant frozen pizza roll (you know, the kind you buy in the freezer case for 99 cents a dozen or whatever), a "taco" was a ladle full of canned chili over a plate of Fritos. Ugh. I told my girls to always remind me to pack their lunches!

Now we have the healthy initiative, the offerings have actually improved, but they are still abysmal. Instead of pizza "sticks", they get actual pizza, and hot dogs now come on a whole wheat bun, but they're still green. The "taco" has been replaced by a chicken quesadilla, which is far preferable but still questionable. Nothing is made from scratch, everything is pre-made, frozen, canned or from a package. Healthy food could be made, but the cooks here do not cook, they just open packages and complain that the kids want Pop Tarts instead of the whole grain muffins that are available now. Phooey on that, I don't even WANT my grandkids to go to school and have a PopTart every day for breakfast, sheesh, and I don't particularly care that they complain about it.

Annie

A town not too far from here has a salad bar. The kids like it.

Years ago I worked with inner city kids and I found that food was one of the greatest ways to connect with them. You might even try and get the kids to share some of their favorite recipes with you--the ones grandma makes when she has time from the two jobs she is holding down to try and keep the roof over everybody's head! A lot of the kids I worked with were hungry, just plain hungry, and were very unfamiliar with the idea of sitting down to a meal. But once they got into the swing of it, they liked it, when they figured out they were in the company of a bunch of people who cared a whole lot about them! I learned a lot my first couple of weeks when the chief punishment for a kid who was being naughty in the morning was to sit him or her down in the field office and give him/her a glass of milk and two oatmeal cookies. But solved the problem 9 times out of ten. The kids were acting squirrel-ey because they were hungry. This is how we ended up with the government providing breakfasts at some schools, the school personnel knew it would make a huge difference in whether the kids could absorb what was going on in the mornings. But offering up unloving corporate slop doesn't cut it, you can't leave out the human caring element!! The combination of good food and someone who cares is an unbeatable combination for making a difference in this world!

Congratulations Colleen. Sounds like the perfect job for you. The students are lucky to have you.

Congratulations Colleen! It sounds like the job is perfect for you, and for the kids, also!