School Life

The Kitchen

We cook a kid-friendly, hearty lunch for the Preschool and Elementary children, prepared from scratch and made with love.

A goal of our lunch program is to introduce the children to a variety of healthy home-cooked meals, and to tempt the pickier eaters who watch the other kids raising their hands for more. Our menus are mostly plant-based, including Meatless Mondays (an initiative by 8th Graders several years ago). School chefs vary the cuisines to encourage all eaters.

In our unique lunch program, a healthy hot lunch is prepared from scratch. Our proteins include Mary’s chicken, Diestel turkey, Beyond Veggie sausage, and Strauss dairy products. Breads are prepared locally at Panorama Baking Company. Organic and local foods are used as feasible. Fresh seasonal fruits are provided for lunch and snacks to al Preschool 3 - 5th Grade students. (Middle school students have to the option to bring their own lunch from home or order from an outside vendor).

The kitchen provides culturally and ingredient appropriate menus for celebrations such as Diwali, Latin Heritage, Hanukkah, Taste of Soul, Lunar New Year, Native American Heritage, and Asian American Pacific Island Heritage. Our chefs also assist in creating age appropriate teaching modules relevant to the celebrations.

The chefs welcome Kindergarten representatives to the kitchen each morning to ask the day’s lunch menu. The students listen carefully, write it with their best guess spelling, and report back to their classmates in an exercise of courtesy, listening, writing, and speaking. At lunch time, designated students from each grade bring a cart loaded with lunch from the kitchen to their classmates and serve them firsts, seconds, and even thirds!

During Extended Day afterschool, we serve healthy house made snacks such as fruit smoothies, freshly baked granola bars, muffins, fruit bars, bean and cheese quesadillas, and pizza. In-house catering is provided. Hearty lunches are also prepared for SFS summer campers.

The kitchen door is always open and parenting adults are always welcome to stop in the kitchen to take a look and say hello!

Happy eating,

Anne and Gaby (with help from Alyssa)