School district staff gets refresher on scratch cooking

Pizza and hamburgers aren't going away just yet, but a few more made-from-scratch meals could appear on the menu next year for students in the Springfield School District.

Thanks to a federal grant obtained by Lincoln Land Community College, 36 kitchen managers in the school district are going through a four-day training course this week on how to prepare homemade meals.

The kitchen managers are learning how to scale recipes and prepare meals from scratch more efficiently, as well as learning different culinary techniques to improve their skills in the kitchen.

Jan Miller, food services director for the district, said the training is a step in the right direction toward serving kids healthier meals. However, she said the district has a ways to go before it can serve homemade meals on a regular basis.

"I would like to see us slowly add more and more from made-from-scratch type items from the menus, but like anything, you can't change overnight," she said.

Greg Christian, a sustainable food service consultant, chef, author and entrepreneur based out of Chicago, is teaching the course at the community college.

Christian said the course is designed to help kitchen managers realize that preparing homemade meals to hundreds of kids isn't as daunting as it may seem.

The key for a school to make the transition is eliminating the variety of options students can choose from for lunch, he said.

It's not an easy task to convince school administrators leery of added costs or delays or kitchen cooks who might gripe about the extra work, he said.

However, the benefits of healthier meals are worth it, Christian said, not only for the kids but for the community.

Instead of paying money to large food providers, the district could keep the money in the community by buying food from local farmers, he said.

"I think more kids eating more real food will help them in a bunch of ways," said Christian, who stressed that he's not a doctor. "I think kids will sleep better, have an easier time learning, they'll feel better, and they probably won't be as heavy."

Kitchen manager Sophia Pulliam said she hopes to prepare spaghetti with homemade marinara sauce for students at Lincoln Magnet School next year thanks to this week's training.

The school currently gets meat sauce shipped to it in bags that cooks heat up and pour over noodles, she said.

Christian showed cooks a simple recipe this week where olive oil and garlic are cooked in one pan and tomatoes in another. The sauce wouldn't be that hard to make during the school year, Pulliam said.