spantini
COO of me, inc.
About 7 years ago I got to thinking back to my Junior and Senior High School days, specifically the spaghetti and meat sauce served for lunches. My all-time favorite meal at school. I would always throw my bagged lunch in the can and get the spaghetti.. went back for seconds, too!
I did some very loosely phrased searches and actually found our government's food/nutrition site for school meals. I thought I hit the freakin' jackpot!
I checked out a bunch of the recipes and was totally impressed, then I zeroed in on, you guessed it... spaghetti and meat sauce. Bingo. All these recipes are for 50-100+ servings so I had to break out the ol' slide rule and commence to cipherin'. First, I made a batch for 25 servings figuring that would be just right as I'd eat 2-3 servings at a clip and this would be 1 week's supply. That worked out great, then I got tired of all the work and modified my operations to simplify and lighten the workload further.
Initially, because I was trying to keep it on a healthier, more nutritious tack, I did not use canned tomatoes, canned or jar sauces - I made sauce from scratch using fresh tomatoes. That got to be waaayyyy too expensive, so I switched to whole canned tomatoes. This was more in line with the original school recipe anyway, and the taste reflected this.
So my current procedure has been to modify the ingredients - slightly. Just switching out beef/pork and replacing it with ground turkey. It's about 1/3 the price and when prepared correctly it's the perfect substitute. Instead of making a week's worth (25 servings) of the whole recipe, I make up a month's worth of seasoning ahead of time. Then I make 1 week's worth of meat sauce (utilizing 1 TBS of seasoning) which keeps nicely in the fridge. Then I prepare single servings of pasta each day as I feel like. This frees up more fridge space and is less work overall...
This site came in handy a while back as I was managing an institutional kitchen for a homeless shelter and I was able to cobble together some interesting meals - some 600+/day.
Just type the food or meal name in the Keyword Search Box at the bottom of the left column.. or browse through all the recipes. I typed 'spaghetti' to get my old school recipe..
Recipes for Schools – Child Nutrition Recipe Box
I did some very loosely phrased searches and actually found our government's food/nutrition site for school meals. I thought I hit the freakin' jackpot!
I checked out a bunch of the recipes and was totally impressed, then I zeroed in on, you guessed it... spaghetti and meat sauce. Bingo. All these recipes are for 50-100+ servings so I had to break out the ol' slide rule and commence to cipherin'. First, I made a batch for 25 servings figuring that would be just right as I'd eat 2-3 servings at a clip and this would be 1 week's supply. That worked out great, then I got tired of all the work and modified my operations to simplify and lighten the workload further.
Initially, because I was trying to keep it on a healthier, more nutritious tack, I did not use canned tomatoes, canned or jar sauces - I made sauce from scratch using fresh tomatoes. That got to be waaayyyy too expensive, so I switched to whole canned tomatoes. This was more in line with the original school recipe anyway, and the taste reflected this.
So my current procedure has been to modify the ingredients - slightly. Just switching out beef/pork and replacing it with ground turkey. It's about 1/3 the price and when prepared correctly it's the perfect substitute. Instead of making a week's worth (25 servings) of the whole recipe, I make up a month's worth of seasoning ahead of time. Then I make 1 week's worth of meat sauce (utilizing 1 TBS of seasoning) which keeps nicely in the fridge. Then I prepare single servings of pasta each day as I feel like. This frees up more fridge space and is less work overall...
This site came in handy a while back as I was managing an institutional kitchen for a homeless shelter and I was able to cobble together some interesting meals - some 600+/day.
Just type the food or meal name in the Keyword Search Box at the bottom of the left column.. or browse through all the recipes. I typed 'spaghetti' to get my old school recipe..
Recipes for Schools – Child Nutrition Recipe Box