Food for Little Kids

Trust is a big part of children's cooking. They have to know you won't pull a fast one.

The children's Chef:

A cook for a child care center knows how to please pint-sized palates
By Randi Bjornstad
The Register-Guard
Published: Wednesday, April 26, 2006

As finicky as most little kids seem to be, imagine cooking lunch for more than a hundred of them every day.

Sigrid Leppert does it - she's the "chef" at the University of Oregon's Child Care and Development Center at 17th Avenue and Moss Street - and even after 12 years at the task, she still loves it.

"In my early years, I worked in restaurants, and when I went to college, I majored in early childhood education," Leppert says. "Even when I was working as a toddler teacher, which I did for eight years, I kept on working in restaurants, too. So this is sort of a great combination."

Not surprisingly with all that experience in teaching and cooking, Leppert's got a lot of tips for child feeding that parents of little ones might want to try.

"I cook for four age groups, and each has different needs," Leppert says. "Of course, the babies have to have soft food because of the risk of choking. The preschoolers want everything separate - it's a texture and taste thing. So when I serve pasta salad, I put the pasta, the olives and the vegetables all out in different bowls and let them put it together themselves. They like that."

Older children want a bigger part in food preparation, and Leppert tries to accommodate their changing tastes.

"Sometimes I go out and sit with the kids and ask them what they'd like to have for lunch or snacks, and they have ideas," she says. "I try to honor that - after all, it's for them."

One day the older children who attend the center after their regular school day approached Leppert and asked her to provide ingredients for "smoothies," a nutritious blender drink usually made with fresh fruit, yogurt or milk, juice and ice cubes.

"They wanted to make the smoothies themselves, so I got the supplies and they did," she says. "They took orders, made the smoothies and served them to the other kids, too."

Because she uses food commodities from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Leppert has to provide meals on a rotation that takes advantage of the government supplies. For example, she makes her three-cheese lasagna about once every three weeks. She also makes vegetarian and nondairy versions of all her meals for children with allergies or intolerances.

She even has a lasagna tip for parents to try at home - she substitutes cottage cheese for ricotta and purees it with tomato sauce for layering with the traditional noodles, mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses.

Other foods in the three-week rotation include a "cook's choice" meal on Mondays, sandwiches, broccoli and fruit on Wednesdays, quesadillas with corn and fruit on Thursdays and turkey and Cheddar foccacia with pickles and fruit on Fridays.

Other weeks, the kids will have entrees such as macaroni and cheese, apple-tuna salad rolls, hummus dip with crackers, vegetables and fruit, and burritos. Once in a while, they even get the perennial kid favorite, hot dogs.

Much as Leppert loves her job, she admits that all that cooking takes a toll on her own meal preparations.

"I have to take an hour or so after I'm done at work before I can even think about cooking at home," she says. "But of course, it's completely different to cook for adults. I enjoy that, too."