LouisianaLA Fit Kids Child Nutrition Programs for a Healthier Louisiana

How Do You Plan Your Menu?

Louisiana offers a variety of fruits and vegetables year-round. Sourcing locally is a smart way to meet federal meal pattern requirements and make sure your students are offered an array of colors in their meals each week. The resources below, in addition to the Louisiana Fit Kids Cycle Menu Seasonality Wheel, will help you plan your menu around seasonal items.

Useful Links:

Characteristics of your School District: This worksheet is a helpful tool to use before you begin menu planning.

Farm to School Timeline and Planning Tool for Food Service: This is a planning tool that will assist you in incorporating local foods into your menu and planning a budget (Farm to School Sample Budget).

Louisiana Cycle Menus (LCM) Fit for Kids: This tool includes a three week cycle menu for K-8 Schools. This set of cycle menus is meant to help Louisiana schools serve tasty meals that fit within the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Meal Guidelines.

Recipe Planning Tips

When exploring new recipes, think about:

Supplemental ingredients your kitchen usually has on hand
Available equipment (See Recommended Kitchen Equipment for Light Processing)
Staff experience and ability to handle the time requirements to prepare a recipe
Total cost for the meal (See Characteristics of Your School/District and Produce Calculator)
Whether students will be interested in the food item(s) being prepared (See Promoting Healthy Foods - Taste Testing Tips and Resources)

Recipes for Seasonal Items

Find out when seasonal food items are available by using the Louisiana Fit Kids Cycle Menu Seasonality Wheel. Promote your seasonal recipes using complimentary Louisiana Harvest of the Month promotional materials!

If you have a recipe featuring a seasonal item available in Louisiana, please send it to the Louisiana Fit Kids File Drop.

Links, Tools and Guides

Recommended Kitchen Equipment for Light Processing: This is a list of recommended equipment for scratch cooking in cafeterias.
Fruits and Vegetables Galore: This resource, developed for school food service professionals by USDA Team Nutrition, provides tools for planning, purchasing, protecting, preparing, presenting and promoting fruits and vegetables.
New School Cuisine Cookbook: This cookbook features over 75 kid-tested recipes; local, seasonal ingredients; and Farm to School resources (Developed by Vermont school nutrition professionals, with collaboration from the New England Culinary Institute and other partners).
USDA What’s In Season? Grouped by seasonality, this web page offers an easy layout for selecting commodities by their respective available seasons with commodity-specific recipes, fact sheets and educational tie-ins (i.e. a story about the item, including a recipe students can make in the classroom).
USDA Recipes for Schools: This user-friendly site, compiled by the Institute of Child Nutrition, lists USDA recipes alphabetically by name and notes the year a recipe was updated.
Louisiana Fit Kids Meal Pattern Resources: There are many more resources and planning tools available on the Meal Pattern page on this website.

Farm to School Activities (listed by SFAs - School Food Authorities)

Food Service teams throughout Louisiana are working with their schools and communities to engage students in Farm to School activities. Below are highlights from schools across the state. If you have a nutritional education or outreach activity that you’d like to share, please send an email to the Louisiana Fit Kids File Drop with a link to an article or information and photos about your program.

2016

Lafayette Parish School System
Farm to School Network Helps Acadiana High Develop School Farm (PDF of news article)