21 School Meals Featuring California Foods

Scaled and tested recipes for reimbursable school meals featuring fresh ingredients.

As a resource for school nutrition services, the Center for Ecoliteracy offers a downloadable collection of 21 recipes for reimbursable school meals, scaled and tested for quantities of 50 and 100.

It includes some favorite recipes from our popular cookbook Cooking with California Food in K–12 Schools, co-authored by Ann Evans and Georgeanne Brennan, as well as a number of new recipes approved by our nutrition services testers.

Inspired by our innovative 6–5–4 menu-planning matrix based on six dishes, five ethnic flavor profiles, and four seasons, the recipes feature fresh California ingredients in an assortment of pasta dishes, wraps, and salads, plus ten rice bowl dishes in five flavor profiles.

A team led by Rethinking School Lunch program manager Adam Kesselman crafted recipes for batch cooking with standard ovens and stovetops and adapted them, where applicable, for tilt skillet production and individual pack-out serving styles.

For easy implementation in school menu rotation, we have included meal plan contributions, NutriKids nutrition analysis, serving size, and recipe yields for all the recipes.

School Meals Featuring California Food cover