Project partners’ meeting in Kurzeme and the first school meals’ master class

S002 “BSR Food Coalition”

On the 1st day of the partners’ meeting on 9 May 2023 the school meals’ project partners from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia met in Jūrkalne (Ventspils County) to discuss of the project progress so far, as well as the planned pilots in each parther region. Each partner shall implement its pilot individually, according to its chosen strategy and activities, incl. by involving a different number of schools, therefore all pilots shall mutually differ from each other. At the same time, some activities for some partners shall be similar, e.g., master clases for school chefs and experience exchange visits between schools. Implementation of pilots shall take place over the whole next year, with the most active period starting in September 2023 and finishing in April 2024.

On the 2nd day of the partners’ meeting on 10 May the partners visited restaurant “Meisons” in Ventspils, where the first pilot activity of Kurzeme Region took place – the master class for chefs and respresentatives of 10 Kurzeme schools on how to cook healthy local meals for school-children lead by the chef and member of the “New chefs’ movement” Žanis Raivo Behmanis. Žanis had been given an unusual task – to fit into the 2,15 EUR limit per meal, which is the support set by the state for 1 small class (grade 1 to 4) child’s meal per day. Žanis did the task sucessfully and cooked 3 different meals: a seemingly “provocative”, yeat healthy pizza with healthy ketchup, Jerusalem artichoke or the so called “ugly potatoes” meal with bacon, sweet cream and lightly salted cucumbers and Kotēni farm grown pearl barley risotto with tomatoes. When preparing food, Žanis wanted the name of the meal to be easy, understandable and interesting for kids – i.e., using the name “ketchup” for the homemade, healthy sauce or by replacing the unusual name of  “Jerusalem artichoke“ with an “ugly potatoe”. Since all kids love pizza, Žanis used it as one of the offered meals, by at the same time replacing the traditional pizza base with a natural yeast dough.

Project partners also were introduced with the traditional “suiti” dish – sklandrausis, which was included in the EU food quality scheme  “Traditional Speciality Guaranteed” in 2011 as the first meal from Latvia. Each partner tried its hand in making the traditional Kurzeme dish and baked an own unique pie!

Presentation: A.Lūse – School meals pilot project

Project activities are being implemented with the support of the Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme 2021-2027.

Information provided by:

Alise Lūse,

BSR Food Coalition Project Manager,
Kurzeme Planning Region,
Phone: + 371 26567874, alise.luse@kurzemesregions.lv