CUSD students are being treated to an international menu for National School Lunch Week 2025. From Oct. 13-17, Food and Nutrition Services has curated a menu of delicious meals from around the world fitting of this year’s theme: Taste the World: Your School Lunch Passport. Each day, at all school levels, unique specials from a different country will be featured on student menus. All handcrafted to highlight a different culinary style and gives students the chance to try new flavors.
Prior to the food debuting on school menus, the F&S team invited some special guests to the Central Kitchen for a tour and taste testing. CUSD Trustees Lisa Davis, Judy Bullockus, Jennifer Adnams, Gila Jones and Lisa Zollinger, student board member Addison Hansen, San Juan Capistrano Mayor Pro Tem John Campbell, Laguna Niguel Council Member Stephanie Winstead and District Office staff eagerly volunteered their time and tastebuds to sample a few of the new menu items.
The FNS team gave the groups a tour of the expanded central kitchen before providing a tasting of five new menu items-
- Pork tonkatsu sandwich with sunomono, a house-made Japanese cucumber salad
- Chicken and cheese enchiladas
- Butter chicken with naan bread and Bombay tater tots
- Swedish meatballs with Trombe pasta and roasted broccolli
- Chicken adobo with brown rice and roasted ube
- Toasted turkey Cubano Baguette
Chef Joana Flor detailed all of the recipes, including where ingredients were sourced and how they were scaled for large preparation. The chicken adobo dish was her family’s recipe, reflecting her Filipino heritage. To finish off the tasting, everyone enjoyed homemade dragon fruit ice cream, utilizing the fresh organic fruit from Dickinson Family Farm in Fallbrook.
National School Lunch Week is a wonderful event to celebrate the eclectic lunches that CUSD students enjoy every week, and the dedicated FNS staff that takes such care in preparing and serving the meals. Be sure to ask your students what their favorite meal of the week was, and maybe even add it into your meal rotation at home.