How do you get a teenager to eat zucchini?
It's a challenge that has stymied school lunchroom workers for years, but students at Falcon Ridge Middle School in Apple Valley have a recipe: Mix the abhorred green veggie into a tasty dish. Pass out samples in the school cafeteria. And if classmates ask what they're eating, avoid mentioning vegetables.
"I told them it was pizza," said 14-year-old Paige Suhsen, who donned a white chef's coat to help serve squares of zucchini egg bake at lunch. Suhsen and other eighth-graders in family and consumer science classes tested the recipe themselves, then put it on the school lunch menu on Thursday. If all goes well, zucchini egg bake à la Falcon Ridge could be served someday in cafeterias throughout the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan school district.
The project was devised by Micki Dahl, the school's food service manager, as a way to get kids more interested in cooking and eating healthful food. "It's hard to get these kids to eat their vegetables, so sometimes we have to trick them into it," she said. "Well, maybe not trick them, but camouflage a little bit."
Camouflage, in this case, took the form of the frittata-like dish, served with salsa on the side.
"If I can get 10 kids to say that it was good, it's a success," Dahl said.
It helped that students -- not adults -- were pressing samples on their friends.
"If we didn't have those kids and we just decided to put a zucchini dish out there, it might bomb," said Wendy Knight, the district's coordinator of food and nutrition services.
