December, 2013
All students received a Wellness Gift bag including a jump rope, orange, sweet potato, and information about free family activities. Here's how CPSC families used their sweet potatoes (which were very generously donated by Green Button Farms): I baked a sweet potato pie for my Grandpa. He loved it so much and said it was his favorite Christmas present of all because it was like my Granny used to make. I felt good to make him feel real happy. Thank you for sending home oranges and potatoes. I really couldn't believe my eyes when I opened his backpack! To be quite frank with you, funds are quite short this year and the last thing that was going to happen this week was buying fresh vegetables or fruit. Instead of stopping by for subs or McD's, we had sandwiches, roasted sweet potatoes, plus that sweet orange for dessert and we are better for it. Thank you SO much. Thank you for the extremely important reminder during this very busy season that the last thing I needed was another trip to Target or to stress about holiday events. What I needed to do was drop everything and get in the kitchen with my kids and take time to cook with them. They couldn't have been more proud and I learned a lesson. Our family may even learn to jump rope...maybe! We peeled and chopped up the sweet potatoes to make a casserole. It was the first time Mom let us use the sharp knives by ourselves and we might even get to do it again since nobody chopped their fingers off. Ha ha ha. Last year, my children brought home candy and sweets on the last day before Christmas. This year they brought home healthy food. That is a wonderful trend we would like to see continued! We plan to roast the potatoes this evening and the oranges were consumed in the van on the way home. Our family used our gift to make sweet potato latkes. They were different and quite tasty; a fun and healthy twist! We made sweet potato latkes with our sweet potatoes. My daughter has not liked sweet potatoes since she was an infant. She normally will not even try them. Because this potato came from school, she tried it willingly and even enthusiastically. She actually hated it and spit it out, but we are grateful she tried it as that is how children learn to try new tastes and textures. Thank you for this cool gesture! With the sweet potatoes, we prepared a pie. One of my children loved it and two didn’t, but it is always wonderful for them to try new things and this is something I would not have prepared for them normally. I saw the man drop off a truck full of sweet potatoes in front of the school and couldn’t imagine what on earth they’d be for. What a neat idea to give kids a raw “material” to prepare their favorite way. We will make soup. Guess what???????!!!!!!!!! The sweet potato from my school was the first real food besides milk my baby cousin ever had in his whole life!!!!! We fried up the sweet potatoes for better fries than you can get in any restaurant! I made a new recipe of sweet potato hash with my dad. We loved it and so we went to Food Lion and got more sweet potatoes and made it again and we loved it again. I never think to bake a sweet potato with dinner, but I just baked it and tossed on a little butter and brown sugar and the kids were fighting over it. We shall have these often as they sure do pack a lot of nutrition. My daughter enjoyed the mashed sweet potatoes we made thoroughly. We enjoyed roasted sweet potato wedges for dinner last night. My daughter asked me to put sweet potatoes on the grocery list. The only potatoes that child has ever requested from the store are POTATO CHIPS, so thank you for making a vegetable seem appealing. The potatoes were delicious. There must be magic in that Bahama soil! I do not like sweet potatoes AT ALL when we usually have them, but this time we had mashed sweet potatoes and it was GOOOOOOOOOOOOOD. I had so much of them. We made sweet potato soup and it was yummy! Oh yeah! Sweet potatoes are my favorite vegetable so I was glad you got that from that farm instead of something like Brussels sprouts which are disgusting. We had sweet potato cubes with onions. We wonder what the secret is, but these were the best sweet potatoes ever. We made muffins. Local really is better. Our sweet potato soufflé was to die for! We are saving our sweet potatoes to contribute to our traditional sweet potato casserole on Christmas Eve. Our sweet potatoes were part of a pie served to family on Christmas. My new favorite pie is sweet potato pie! These particular sweet potatoes are sweet and rich in taste even without added sugar. We made soup with our sweet potatoes! We looked up a recipe on pauladeen.com and it was for sweet potato biscuits and they turned out amazing. We made chocolate chip sweet potato muffins. MMM-good. Each person in my family made something with sweet potatoes. Dad made sweet potato pancakes. My brother made sweet potato fries. I made sweet potato cupcakes with my mom! They were the BEST!!!!!!!!! We made sweet potato pie that was heavenly. We are inspired to try planting sweet potatoes in our own garden next year. What a cool way to send kids off for the holidays! We are currently making a sweet potato cauliflower soup. We had sweet potato-kale-black bean enchiladas! We gobbled the sweet potatoes down. It was so refreshing to receive something healthy instead of candy canes and cookies! We had baked sweet potato fries with Swiss chard omelettes tonight! My daughter insisted we bake her potato the first night for dinner. It was wonderful. I plan on indulging myself in a treat of a baked sweet potato with cinnamon, butter and a little sugar. YUM. |