It’s been a busy and exciting time here at Norse Group with the launch of our new brand, marking the beginning of a new era for the Group. ‘United in Purpose’ is our brand message and it brings together everything we stand for as an organisation. In Catering especially, our people often live within the communities in which we serve, and we can see the difference we make to people’s lives through nutritious, tasty food in schools and care settings.
We recently ran a ‘Design a School Lunch’ competition where we invited local school children to get creative and come up with a school lunch that is fun, tasty, and nutritious, but also consider making it as eco-friendly as possible. We provided hints and tips on food groups to include and how to think about seasonal and local ingredients to help reduce the food miles. We had 206 amazing entries and the judges had quite the challenge in selecting a winner…but we are pleased to announce Addie from Fairhaven was our winner with her ‘Super Six Veggie Curry’! Well done Addie, we look forward to serving your fantastic creation during Eco Week this April.
We are delighted to have been awarded bronze level Food for Life across our Primary Schools for the 13th year running! This accreditation recognises our commitment to sourcing sustainable ingredients with over 75% of our dishes being cooked from scratch.
A firm favourite in the school calendar is World Book Day and we celebrated this with a fun menu themed around some of our favourite books. Many of our amazing kitchen teams dressed up for the occasion, much to the delight of their school children! We also just had to share Queen’s Hill Primary School’s fantastic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory display.
Our care residents have a selection of delicious menus to enjoy over the Easter weekend; including roast shoulder of lamb followed by a rather indulgent hot cross bun bread and butter pudding with custard. The recipe for this delicious dessert can be found here.
We are delighted to launch our new Primary School Spring/Summer Menu this April and really hope our young customers enjoy our varied dishes using local and seasonal ingredients where possible. Some new dishes to look out for are beef meatball sub roll, cauliflower, chickpea and potato curry, banana flapjack, and marble cake! Following on from our award-winning FLOURISH pledge about involving children in our menu development process, we have been able to trial and perfect our new recipe ideas with children and student councils.
- For our new Cauliflower, Chickpea and Potato Curry – 85% of children would choose it from the menu
- For our new Banana Flapjack – 93% of children would choose it from the menu
We also have some of our most popular dishes for good measure like homemade margherita pizza (did you know it’s made with 50/50 flour?), roast chicken and fish fingers.
There is no greater compliment than being contacted by parents asking for one of our school meal recipes and we are thrilled to have had quite a flurry of requests recently! Toffee cream shortcake will always feature as a favourite, but recent requests have included apple flapjack and margherita pizza. Among the many benefits of school meals, they also provide children an opportunity to try new foods with their friends and we feel really privileged to be part of a child’s food discovery journey. If there are any recipes you would like to try at home, please just contact us. Alternatively, we have recipes to download on our care, primary and high school webpages for anyone to enjoy – and we would love to see your photos too!
Until next time,
Norse Catering
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