LET’S NOSH! My recipe for healthy and tasty school dinners

By Lottie Cannon

For many children around the world, school dinner is the most healthy and nutritional meal of the day. For some it might be the only square meal they eat all day and the only chance to enjoy hot food.

Children at schools like mine may not fully appreciate the importance of a good school meal. We should realise a healthy lunch makes us cleverer and helps keep us fit and healthy.

So all those complaints about school lunch need to be put in context as we remember the many children whose wellbeing relies on these lunches. The food at my school is pretty good, but there is always room for improvement!

My friends and I at Kerem Primary School in Hampstead Garden Suburb often complain about our school lunches. We want our food to be more interesting.

I told my headteacher, Miss Burns, about this blog post – so she set me a challenge!

Create a meal that is:

1. Dairy free
2. Nut free
3. Relatively cheap
4. Healthy
5. Not spicy

So here goes…!

Main course

Salmon on Croute with spinach inside. The béchamel sauce can be made with soya milk, so this dish is dairy free, fish is very healthy, nut free, not spicy, but most importantly, its tasty (and colourful).

Desert 

I recently went strawberry picking with my dad, brother and friend and we picked lots and lots of strawberries and needed to work out what to do with them all. The answer…. Bright pink muffins!

Perfect for school lunches, they contain fruit (so healthy), relatively few ingredients and all basic ones and totally delicious as well as being dairy free.

Here’s my recipe:

1 2/3 cups fresh strawberries

½ cup sugar

1/3 cup of vegetable oil

2 eggs

1 ½ cups plain flour

½ teaspoon of baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon cinnamon

Mix all the ingredients together, divide into 12 muffin cases and cook on 175 c for 15 mins.

Very simple and delicious.

So as I leave Kerem School, this is a great idea for lunch. Make sure you tell me how it goes down!