School Lunch

Today I was at the Nursery School all day. Part of my job involves staying and helping with lunch on Thursdays. I also get to eat. I thought I'd share with you what these little kids are eating for their dejeuner. (By the way, I still can't get past the fact that dejeuner means lunch, and diner means dinner here in France. In Canada, dejeuner is breakfast, lunch is called diner, and supper was souper. I guess the France version makes more sense, but I can't stop thinking that I'm always saying 'breakfast' when I talk about lunch).

It's a hot lunch program. The kids either go home, or stay and eat the lunch program meal. There were about 10 kids that stayed in the room I was in. I ate with the 4-5yr olds, and they set the tables, and served the food to their classmates. I was surprised that there weren't any spills!

The menu:
Entree--some kind of soup. They called it a potage, and I never did figure out exactly what was in it. I don't think the teachers knew either. It had a texture similar to a potato-based soup. It was quite nice.

Plat--a kind of veal roll. It was ground veal, in a log shape, with some other meat wrapped around it, with a gravy. Mashed potatoes, and a vegetable that I had never heard of before, salsifi. I don't think it translates; I asked the one teacher who actually speaks English as her first language, and she didn't think it had an 'English' name. It looked a bit like peices of white asparagus, and it had a slimy sauce on it. It was a bit sweet. I didn't find the vegetable sauce too appealing, but the meat was quite good, and well, potatoes are potatoes.

Dessert--yogurt and a creme caramel style dessert in a yogurt cup (pre-packaged). The creme caramel dessert was quite tasty, I'm going to look for them in the grocery store next time. The yogurt was interesting. I really haven't had much luck with yogurt over here. It was regular 'flavoured' yogurt, apparently without any artificial flavours or colours. The weird thing was that it looked like plain yogurt. All the flavours were white, and smooth. There wasn't any fruit in them, just some colourless flavour. It was quite strange.

The kids also get a snack in the morning and afternoon, and the weekly lunch menu is posted outside the school for the parents to see. One of the teachers couldn't believe one of the kids wasn't eating with two hands (using a knife and fork). She had to show him how to use the knife to slide food onto the fork. Quite amusing! Definetly not your typical North American style cafeteria meal! Not a sandwich in sight, and the kids seemed to enjoy it for the most part. Most of them didn't want any vegetables, but everyone had to try them. Other than that, most of the plates were clean.

On another note, I noticed that one of the 4yr olds had a Christian Dior ski jacket. I didn't even know that Dior made kids clothes! (no, I wasn't snooping at the kids labels, the jacket had "Dior" embroidered on the back in large letters.)