Cumbrian Carrot Connections
Growing healthier futures
Growing healthier futures
Why carrots?
In these recipes, carrots are the star ingredient – they’re sustainable, healthy, local, and versatile. Kids typically love carrots so they make a great addition to any meal. They’re easily blended into dishes, adding extra fibre and vitamins. They’re also great centre stage in dishes such as the creamy coleslaw and sunshine salad. They add colour, texture and a tasty, sweet flavour to dishes. Carrots are also an excellent source of beta-carotene which is converted to Vitamin A by our bodies. Vitamin A is great for our eyesight so you can see where the idea of carrots helping you see in the dark comes from.
We recommend reading the information below before you start cooking!
All the recipes have been created to meet the portion sizes recommended for primary school children (4-10 year olds) in the School Food Standards guidance. Each recipe makes 10 portions (unless stated otherwise), so you can easily multiply ingredient quantities for larger volumes. They would also make approximately 6 portions for secondary school age children or serve a family (2 adult portions and 2-3 child size portions).
Five of the recipes are completely free of the 14 main allergens. Some recipes do contain gluten and soya (but can easily be swapped for alternatives), and we have highlighted where they may contain other allergens (depending upon the exact ingredients used).
Watch out for sulphites in tinned beans, dried fruit, and pre-made sauces. It’s also worth checking that your vegetable stock doesn’t contain celery and that your mayonnaise is free from mustard.
We have deliberately avoided including nuts in these recipes, but because they are such an excellent source of important nutrients, please do include them in your dishes if you can.
For each recipe, we have included an approximate cost per serving. Ingredient prices have been taken from the Asda website as we do not buy ingredients from wholesalers and are aware that prices vary depending on the size of your catering operation and who you buy from. We hope these supermarket prices act as a good guide that you can scale up or down depending on your own unique costs.
We have included some key nutrition facts for each recipe, calculated using a professional nutritional analysis tool, Nutritics, focusing on:
We have included a carbon rating for each recipe to show you the approximate carbon dioxide equivalent emissions. We use Foodsteps to calculate the carbon emissions for each recipe. We hope this helps to raise awareness of the impact our food choices have on climate change and the environment, and encourages you to add more sustainable food to your menus.
By simply adding in more plants to meat- and dairy-based dishes, we can make favourite dishes even more delicious and nutritious. A technique ProVeg call ‘blending’, this easy method lets you enrich familiar recipes with tasty plant-based ingredients, boosting both fibre and flavour. For example, with an animal-based recipe, you can combine local and seasonal vegetables like carrots, tomatoes, and butternut squash, and add nourishing plant proteins such as beans and lentils, to create dishes that are not only super tasty but also lower in saturated fat and have a smaller carbon footprint.
School Food Standards require that a 50-75g portion of red meat or poultry is served at lunchtime, but that this can be proportionately reduced in composite dishes (casseroles, stews, pies and curries) if adding another protein-based food, such as beans.
Take a look at this list of plant-based proteins that would work well blended into meat dishes. You can see their nutritional profile, carbon measurement and dish suggestions.
Below you can read instructions on how to combine plant and animal proteins – the technique ProVeg call blending – for some of their most popular school meals: spaghetti Bolognese, Sri Lankan carrot & coconut curry, and cottage pie.
Successfully blending dishes on your menus perfectly captures ProVeg’s philosophy: a small change can have a big impact.
Visit our Low Carbon Food Programme webpage or email our Low Carbon Food Project Manager, Laura:
Insert info on resources available and how to use them
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