School districts are coming together to bring better tasting foods to valley schools

Culinary Arts students at La Quinta High are producing new recipes for school breakfast and lunch at the A Recipe Development Event.

"The goal here really is so that all of the districts walk away with a handful of recipes that we can implement next year," says the lead organizer, Chef of A Recipe Development, and Director of Nutrition Services at Jurupa Unified School District, Michelle Poirier. "So we have six districts here today. The six districts that are a part of the Fast Scratch Program are Desert Sands Unified, Palm Springs Unified, Coachella Valley Unified, Redlands Unified, Jurupa Unified, and Morongo Unified School District.

"We have all attested to that 40% Fast scratch or scratch from the CDE was a program with it's a grant funded program where we got extra money," says Poirier. "The goal was just to get everybody cooking and having fun together so we can we can get back into having fun in the kitchen."

The Director of Nutrition Services of Desert Sands Unified says their district received three million dollars for this program. "That's a great deal of money," says the director, Daniel Cappello. "So we're going to invest in kettles, tilt, skillets, grills, all kinds of stuff so that we can start cooking again, we're doing some cooking now, but not on the scale of where we want to be."

News Channel 3: What does "Fast Scratch" mean?

Michelle Poirier: "Fast Scratch is taking a raw or minimally processed product and adding it to like, say a pizza, we take fresh veggies, and we add them to a frozen pizza. That makes it fast scratch. So we're getting closer to making total scratch. But it's baby steps."

A Chef decided to host the event in order to provide students with a better menu when they eat breakfast and lunch at school. Students are not only preparing different recipes, but they are also taste testing the recipes that their peers will eat this upcoming school year. It is not a complete revamp of the menu; they are adding to meals.

News Channel 3: What excited you to be in the kitchen preparing meals that could be on your school's cafeteria menu?

Jason Garcia, 12th Grade La Quinta High Student: Mostly to help out, but I want to change the school lunches. Because once I heard they're gonna try to make 40% of the lunches cooked. I thought that was a good idea. So I wanted to try to help out.

Marvin Leal, 11th Grade La Quinta High School Student: It was quite exciting because we are making new dishes hopefully to be able to give to new students to be able to actually eat and enjoy their meals while they attend school.