Did that title make sense? It does if you’re doing Loopy Academy and remembered that we’re doing a “cafeteria connection” from time to time. And just what is a cafeteria connection? It’s remembering back to our school cafeterias long ago!
Do you have memories of your school cafeteria? For some reason, I have so many (though most of them are from elementary school). When we were in sixth grade, the teachers appointed some of us to work in one cafeteria job or another during lunchtime. For a time, my job was collecting milk money from students when a carton of milk was a whopping 4 cents. I remember thinking they needed to make it a nickel so I didn’t have to go through all of those pennies, giving back change. Eventually it did switch to 5 cents and that was a happy day! I also remember if you were in the dishwasher position, you could stretch out the time it took to rinse the trays and send them through the dishwasher so that you might be able to miss 20 minutes of history class. We tried to do that often. 🙂
Today I’m sharing a recipe for School Cafeteria Peanut Butter Brownies. We had these a lot (or something like them), because I think peanut butter must have been relatively cheap back then. If you like peanut butter, I think you’ll like these.
School Cafeteria Peanut Butter Brownies
1 cup butter
1 1/2 cups peanut butter (I used chunky, but either will work)
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 Tbl. vanilla
4 eggs
2 cups flour
Melt the butter and peanut butter together, then set aside to cool.
In a separate bowl, combine sugar, brown sugar and salt. Mix in one egg at a time. Add in vanilla. Add in cooled peanut butter/butter mix and stir until just combined. Mix in flour.
Butter a 9 x 13 pan and line the bottom with parchment paper. Pour batter into prepared pan.
Bake at 350 degrees for 35-40 minutes.
Let cool in pan.
Icing:
1 cup powdered sugar
1/4 cup peanut butter, melted
Milk (approx 3 Tbl)
Mix all three ingredients, adding more milk as needed for desired consistency.
When pan is cool, flip them out onto a cooling rack set over a cookie sheet. Drizzle the icing over the top. Let icing set and then cut into bars.
Now – what is the best food item that they served in your school cafeteria – did you have a favorite?
Sheri
Brings back memories! I, too, remember haveing cafeteria assignments and getting out of class for them, haha! Everyone’s favorite was the turkey lunch only served a couple of times a year. It was REAL turkey not the processed lunchmeat stuff, too.
You don’t note where to add the flour in the recipe. Might be an issue for beginning bakers. Cheers!!
Oh, I remember turkey dinners too – thanks for jogging that memory! You’re right – that was always so good, and the whole school smelled like roasting turkey. 🙂
Those look delicious! My favorite food at school was always the mashed potatoes. I’m sure they were instant but I always bought lunch if they were on the menu:)
They are delicious! Mashed potatoes sound good. I wonder if they were instant? But I guess it would be too time consuming to peel that many potatoes for the school.
Ha! I think the school cafeterias made peanut butter everything because at the time it was a government commodity that made it cheap for the school districts. I honestly can’t remember liking anything made in the cafeteria except perhaps cinnamon rolls they served with the chili. The chili was awful but I bought lunch that day to get the roll.
That’s so funny. I had never heard of serving cinnamon rolls with chili until a friend of mine told me that was a thing. So your school served it that way? I’d be buying on those days, too, then!
I hope they taste better than they look. I like my PB mixed with w/chocolate ganache , now that I make the brownies.. As a kid I would have loved those. Our cafeteria usually served fruit or dry shortbread cookies or jello for dessert.
Oxtail soup was the one dish they made well in our school and was something my mom never made.
Well – when you make peanut butter brownies with peanut butter frosting – they’re going to look like peanut butter… And they are delicious.
Sheri, *I* think they look delish and I am making them this wknd!
🙂 Hope you liked them!
Coffee cake!!!
It was soft with crumbs on top, with a carton of milk. I honestly can’t remember the food much
That sounds great – and perfect with milk!
These sound delicious. Will be making soon! Unfortunately I don’t remember anything from the school cafeteria. My mother packed our lunches.
I hope you like them. We did!
Swedish Rye Bread
That way we could have a peanut butter sandwich if we didn’t like the food
Well that sounds good!
I loved the cheese enchiladas we had on alternate Fridays (wish I had the recipe for the sauce). It has just been in the last few years that it dawned on me why we had cheese enchiladas one Friday and fish sticks the next throughout the school year.
I am loving this whole Cafeteria Confidential (yeah there’s a reality series we’d all watch). Sheri, I too remember when the milk cartons were 4 cents and the big deal when they also offered CHOCOLATE milk which was 5 cents! Our grade school cafeteria served the blandest spaghetti I have ever seen, I was certain the ‘sauce’ was actually watered down tomato soup (which was served the day before)
I have many wonderful memories of school lunches, starting with the green compartmentalized trays. At my Denver school, I could walk home for lunch, or bring a sack lunch & buy a piece of homemade chocolate cake for a nickel. At my Castle Rock schools there were homemade rolls every day~ yum. When I was teaching in a small Colorado town, all the food was made from scratch at the high school and delivered to the middle and elementary school every day… and we had fabulous cinnamon rolls and chili. That was my favorite lunch!
Yummmmmm!
My favorite was sort of a shepherd’s pie, cafeteria style. It was ground beef in a brown gravy with mashed potatoes on top. My little sister, in first grade at the time, called it “ground grief with green gravy” and the name has stuck throughout the years in my family. Also, we had a cafeteria that doubled as an auditorium when they pushed the tables aside, so it was called the “Cafetorium,” which my parents found equally funny and appalling. At the time I didn’t get it, but now I do!
Our cafeteria served chocolate-glazed yeast doughnuts and if you were there before 7:30, they were warm out of the oven. I tried to get to school early to “study” in the Cafeteria as many days a week as I could.:)
I loved the square pizza slices. I would order two when they had it on the lunch menu.
I also loved breakfast for lunch, yum.
I forgot about square pizza slices – we had those, too!