Chili and cinnamon roll day at school lunches

Yvonne Smith

Yvonne Smith

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I don’t know if other towns did this, but in my little north Idaho town, every Thursday was the day that all of the schools made chili and cinnamon rolls for our school lunches. This is probably the only day that every single kid wanted to have school lunches, because those cinnamon rolls were the most awesome cinnamon rolls in the whole world !

The meal was probably one of the cheapest ones we got since it was mainly just a bowl of chili beans and the flour necessary to make the cinnamon rolls, and nothing else.
It is also the only school lunch item that I even remember anymore, although the other lunches were all good, too. They just were not as memorable, at least for me.

What was the meal that you remember from school lunches that you looked forward to each week ?
 
I remember pizza day and other cafeteria prepared lunches (elementary school years), but bring raised in a home where money was tight, it was always a brown-paper bagged lunch for us kids.

I can still smell that mouth-watering pizza smell wafting through the hallways of the school, thinking how luck all the kids were that had money to enjoy a slice or two!

As for the bagged lunches I had all the way through school, the most enjoyable part of my plain bagged lunch was when mom would pack something in the way of a homemade treat inside. A tart, a couple of cookies, a piece of cake, a square or two, always made for an enjoyable lunch.
 
School was always close enough to walk home for lunch. Elementary school was around the corner and a block away. Junior High was across the alley in back of the house. High School was farthest which was up hill and about a ten minute walk.
 
I liked the way in which school lunches were done in our school district. Rather than some kids being poor enough to qualify for free lunches, while others had to pay or bring their own, lunch was free for everyone, although in high school, I rarely ate school lunch; instead, we walked downtown to a restaurant that would set up for high school students, serving hamburgers and French fries. In order to get something else, you'd have to sit down and order and you may or may not have time for that during a lunch period. Besides, the burgers and fries were great.

I never once brought a lunch from home, given that school lunches were free for everyone. As for ones that were memorable, one thing that stuck with me is that, in elementary school, they would always have fish sticks on Friday, but the fish sticks were always for the Catholics only. Since I usually preferred the fish sticks to whatever they had for us Protestants, I'd lie and say I was Catholic. Being a small town and all, they probably knew darned well that I wasn't Catholic, but I got the fish sticks anyhow.

Other that, I can't think of anything in particular that stands out. I don't remember school lunches being bad in elementary school, but apparently there wasn't anything special because I don't recall them, and I doubt that I ate the school lunch in high school more than a few times.
 
I spent grade 5 and 6 at a new concept school. Lunch, recess, homework, tutoring. As someone who does not care to do dishes I quickly discovered that student helpers got to eat teacher fare. Some of the food was simply gross such as soup of the week off Friday aka leftovers in one pot, no spice, everything cooked until it gave up.
 
I remember having fish sticks too. I guess every school had "fish stick Friday". I remember having a bowl of chili and crackers on our trays, along with some type of fruit. On the cafeteria tables, there was several bowls of hard cheese cut into squares on chili day too. Some days we would have hamburger, chips, fruit, and a brownie. We always had a choice of a small carton of chocolate or white milk. You could drink water, if you didn’t want that.

We never had free lunches at our grade school. My parents paid, “I think”, $1.50 for the week per child to eat a hot lunch at school. The school also had an option for kids to be kitchen helpers, if they wanted to work in the kitchen for a daily free lunch for that week. You didn’t have to be poor to be able to get to work in the kitchen. I think they allowed 3 kids a week to help. The helpers cleaned the treys off, loaded them into the big dishwasher, hand washed pots and pans, and wiped down tables. However, kids would lose their lunch hour playing outside on the playground if they chose to work in the kitchen.
 
I don’t remember my mother ever making me a school lunch, but I do remember having a lunch box, so I think that she must have done so. I went to school at the Seventh Day Adventist school until 5th grade, and it was held at their church, and not very many of us, so I think I must have taken a lunch along.
By the time I was in Jr. High, I made my own lunches, so i mostly just had tuna fish sandwiches, since that was easy to make.

We never had pizza in school, or anywhere else in my little town , until I was in senior high school, so around 1960 probably, when someone opened a pizza parlor. I had never had pizza or even heard of it, but once I tried it, I immediately loved it.
Back then, there were little boxes of pizza mix that you could buy, mix up the dough, add the tomato sauce and the little packet of cheese, and make your own pizza.

I am trying to remember if we had fish sticks, and I am not sure about that, either.
 
Beth Gallagher said:
This lady was a "lunchroom lady" for 16 years and she has posted several school lunchroom recipes. I like her channel for recipes, canning and gardening stuff.

School Lunchroom Pizza

Click to expand...
I like her shelf of all her canned goods in the background! Looks really nice! Didn't she say they served corn with pizza at her school? I have never- ever ate corn with pizza, or even thought about it. :LOL:
 
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