What's For (School) Dinner?

Happy International School Meals Day! Yes, there’s a whole day (March 15th) dedicated to celebrating school dinners around the world.

The mere mention of school dinners sends some people into a cold sweat, as images of lumpy semolina pudding, spotted dick (stop sniggering) and gloopy mac’n’cheese that was stickier than superglue come back to haunt them.

Elsewhere in the world, schoolchildren are served slightly more impressive-sounding meals at a typical lunchtime, from kimchi in South Korea to beef bourguignon in France and savoury pancakes in Finland – jealous?

The school dinners we were served in the UK weren’t all bad though, were they? Who remembers turkey dinosaurs? And what about potato smiles? And not forgetting sponge cake and pink custard.

We’ve got you feeling all nostalgic now, haven’t we, wishing you could go back and sample that perfect pastel pink custard once more? Well, we’re going to show you how you can recreate classic school dinner dishes for yourself at home, with all of the best tastes, no queuing up, no scary dinner ladies, no overwhelming smell of boiled carrots and no having to eat everything out of separate compartments. What was the education system’s issue with food touching?!

Turkey does not taste best when it’s covered in lashings of cranberry sauce with your Christmas dinner; turkey tastes best when it’s shaped like a dinosaur and covered in breadcrumbs. That’s a fact.

We can’t remember how old we were when we decided we were too cool and grown-up to be eating dinosaur-shaped turkey breast anymore, but we do know we were wrong. You’re never too old for a turkey dinosaur.

Bring them back into your life by making your own like Jess and Josh Cook. You don’t need to be a talented artist to get a perfect T-rex – you just need some dinosaur-shaped biscuit cutters. Add whatever spices you like to the breadcrumb mix to bring the turkey dinosaur well and truly into the 21st century – Chinese five spice dinosaurs for tea, anyone? And what better to serve them with than curly fries?

Like steak and chips, and bacon and egg, turkey dinosaurs and curly fries are one of the classic food pairings. But we’re not talking about simply opening a packet. Instead, dig out your spiralizer, put a couple of potatoes through it and bake them in the oven. Genius, we know.

Again, mum’s roast potatoes aren’t the best kind of spuds – potato smiles are. They were so good they were literally beaming permanently. The happiest potato of them all.

You can make your own out of mashed potato like Yummy Tummy Aarthi, with a little help from a smiley face biscuit cutter. Pop them in the oven to bake rather than deep frying them like the recipe suggests to make them a little healthier.

Serve with beans or alphabet spaghetti. In fact, swap the smiley face cookie cutter for alphabet ones and have an alphabet-themed feast. Actually, we’ve never really thought about it before, but was all the letter-shaped food we were served up at school just a way to drum our ABCs in to us?

Well, alphabet-shaped food still tastes good and it’s still funny to spell out ‘bum’.

There must have been a meeting of school canteen staff one day, where they brainstormed ‘how can we make the unhealthy fried food item that is chips all the more unhealthy?’. And the conclusion was, cover them in cheese and smother them in gravy.

In Canada, a very similar dish is known as poutine, and it’s been increasingly popping up on hipster restaurant menus over here too. But we believe the origins of chips, cheese and gravy belong to the British school canteen, although we’re in full support of them travelling over to your dinner table at home too.

Use your Tefal ActiFry to make your own chips – much healthier than the traditional fried version! Cover them in reduced-fat grated cheese and make your own gravy using a few teaspoons of gravy granules or a beef stock cube to pour over the top. Perfection on a plate.

Angel Delight was indeed a delight sent from the heavens for our taste buds. It was slightly luminous and much better than any grown-up mousses we’ve tried since. Butterscotch was hands-down the best flavour and strawberry had a unique taste that was less fruit and more artificial flavouring, but delightful all the same.

You can still buy Angel Delight, but you can also make your own and Greens of the Stone Age has a brilliant recipe for a chocolate version that’s full of stuff that’s much better for you than any of those weird coloured powdered chemicals from our school dinner days.

The recipe includes chia seeds, maple syrup, coconut milk and carob powder. Carobs are a less bitter alternative to cocoa beans, so using this ingredient will give your fake Angel Delight the perfect sweet flavour. And you can eat as much of it as you like in the knowledge that you’re filling your body with good stuff.

Remember in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when Harry drinks the Felix Felicis potion and has the luckiest day of his life? The sun shines, the birds sing and everything goes exactly his way. That’s what it was like when chocolate sponge cake and pink custard was on the school dinner menu. It was automatically the best day of the week and everything was going to be great, because pink custard was magic and put everyone in the best of moods.

When was the last time you enjoyed a dessert as much as that? Too long ago, that’s when. Put that right immediately and make yourself Mint Custard’s chocolate sponge and pink custard for dessert tonight – there is no better way to celebrate International School Meals Day 2018. Fact.