Maryann Durrant (USBE):
Let’s go over some examples of menu records. You can see that this is a production record, but there is a lot of white space. Remember though, that the areas for the planning and actuals are for your benefit, they’re not required. Let’s look at the rest of the information. We have the date, we know that it’s lunch or dinner, we have the planned number of children and actual number of children served. That all looks good. The issue with this production record is that the menu is not detailed enough.
While you might assume that we know what is in mac and cheese, there is a wide variety of recipes for mac and cheese. You’d also need to be serving quite a bit of cheese to get the amount needed to meet the minimum serving size for meat/meat alternate. Fruit in season doesn’t tell us or your staff what fruit that is exactly. We need that information when comparing your food served to what you purchased. Mixed veggies is also very vague. Did you serve frozen, canned, fresh vegetables? Did some of the children get one vegetable and the others a different one? While this production record has a lot of the information filled out that it needs, it doesn’t have enough detail on the components.
This would be an example of a production record with all of the needed information. Notice that rather than saying the entrée (mac and cheese) it splits the entrée out into components. Don’t worry that we won’t know what entrée you’re serving, we can always look at the menu posted at your center to determine what the components contributed to. In this example, ham is added to the mac and cheese to meet the minimum meat/meat alternate serving size. Because there are two foods contributing to the meat/meat alternate component, the serving sizes for each of the foods was completed to show how much of each made up the serving size. You can see that it lists fresh peaches rather than “fruit in season” and it goes into more detail with the mixed vegetables. The elbow macaroni is clearly listed and easy to see that this is the grain component for the meal. Although they chose to not complete the planned and actual quantities portions, this production record would be considered adequate to meet the CACFP requirements.
Next we’ll move on to an example of a detailed menu record. You can see that it has the date, it lists out the menu and has the number of children planned, served, and number of adults served. We’re missing quite a lot of information on this detailed menu record though. We would need the portion sizes by age group as well as the number of children planned and served separated by age group. Also, just like the production record example, the entrée is listed rather than the components. The spaghetti probably has meat in it, but you wouldn’t be able to know for sure from this record. If we came out on a review and your detailed menu record was filled out like this, we would have to take back the money you received for this meal.
This is a detailed menu record that is correctly filled out for that same meal. You can see that the individual components are written out, rather than just listing the entrée. The components are also very detailed, specifying that the green beans are canned, the 1 year olds are receiving whole milk, those 2 and up are receiving 1%. The serving sizes for each component are listed and the number of children planned and served is divided by age category.
Remember that you can fill in the components and serving sizes separated by age and save a copy electronically, or make copies and just re-use the detailed menu record, updating the date, and number of children planned and served to reflect the current numbers. While this menu record looks like it might take a lot of work to do, once you get it set up correctly, you can use it over and over again.
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