Recipes and menu planning serve as the building blocks for healthy meals and overall diet. Healthy meal patterns that meet the Dietary Guidelines for Americans are achieved by considering the overall food intake over a period of time and consuming a variety of foods. While individual recipes cannot meet the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, collectively they can contribute to meeting the recommendations. School food service should include recipes that highlight whole grains; fresh, frozen, canned and dried fruits and vegetables; fat-free and low-fat dairy; lean protein or seafood. And these recipes need to be tasty enough that students will eat the healthier choices. Good lunchroom management by the on-site managers and cooks is primary in being able to meet goals of menu ordering, budgeting, production records, connecting the recipe/menu to production records and serving good foods.
In Garrard County poor past management of school food service from a variety of reasons and the changes on a national/state level to enforce healthier cafeteria management resulted in the hiring of new personnel and a commitment to change December 2016.  Partnering with the Garrard County School Food Service Director and staff, FCS agent worked to present during year-end training. Goals included nutrition education, menu planning, recipe choosing, using fresh, and increasing knowledge in basic cooking skills.  This agent surveyed students while in the school cafeterias eating lunch on such topics as best foods served, what changes students would like, what other foods would be welcomed, what foods not liked and why and general questions on foods they like to eat.  This was spring 2017.
As a result of the 2-day training (which none of the employees had ever had nutrition training or training on cooking techniques) employees increased their knowledge about using recipes and menu planning to meet nutritional guidelines, realized the connection between recipes and menus to the production records, menu ordering and budgeting. Forty-one employees attended the training from all five schools in the school district.
One employee remarked she did not understand until training how menu planning and using certain recipes connected to the production records and meeting guidelines. She commented, "this makes filling out the reports make sense now".
Update: It has been more than six-months into the school year and checking with the Food Service Director resulted in a report of the following: "school cafeteria managers are using the USDA recipes.  It did help in that it gave those who were willing to listen to think about trying something new and look for new ideas. They have printed and are using recipes off the USDA website, and have found a few of them that the students do like. New staff are coming into more positive situations and that has helped. They are actually doing more batch cooking and very little is coming in pre-packaged or heat and eat. 

They are using recipes now for meatloaf, chili, other soups and such. They are also using the recipe for the pasta salad, but for instance at the high school, she added more veggies. She has also found other pasta salad recipes and vegetable related salads. 

They were struggling terribly with not understanding a “plan” number and how many servings, etc. for their meal service and production records. The larger quantity recipes --- such as you shared has helped with that also." 

School food service continues to be an opportunity to teach about nutrition, influence foods students eat and enjoy and assist in positive and productive cafeteria management practices.Future collaborative efforts are being planned.