Munich: lure raspberry dressing, how does good daycare food work? – Munich

Boxes speckled with neon colors are stacked in the anteroom of the canteen kitchen, piled high on trolleys before being sent to all parts of Munich in the trunk of the Sprinter. Ten o’clock, time to deliver. Soon the children of the city, who are marching in twos to the playground, still shakily jumping to nursery rhymes or just bending their heads over exercise books, will get hungry. Susanne Klug’s team prepared lunch for 6,000 of them. Today there is Asian coconut noodle stew, with or without chicken, and lemon cake for dessert.

Klug has a degree in ecotrophology and is an entrepreneur with 47 employees. And mom of two sons, Vincent and Frederik are 11 and 13 years old. Their “Children’s Kitchen” catering supplies around 300 crèches, kindergartens and schools with a warm lunch. She hadn’t planned it that way though. Not at all.

Asian noodles with soy sauce and vegetables are her favorite dishes as a child, and of course spaghetti bolognese. The main thing is from mom, a gifted cook. So the genetic and native predisposition was obviously there. And then there was a cooking class in elementary school. The colorful raw food platter that she put together there, she later proudly puts on her dad’s table. The late consequence: Klug studies ecotrophology, a combination of nutrition and household science, in Weihenstephan with a focus on child nutrition.

“I love to cook,” says Susanne Klug, and she has done so all her life. Also in her flat-sharing community and when she starts working in the “Cooking” editorial department of a guidebook publisher. Klug has ideas and wants to implement them. But when she heard her ideas for change, she usually heard a discouraging “But we’ve always done it this way”.

And so she finally exchanges one of her ideas for editorial life: a cooking school for children. Her father asked if she didn’t want to give courses at the adult education center first. But that was not at all what Susanne Klug had in mind at the age of 29. It should be your own thing, both beautiful and good. So her father helped with a loan.

Pink Smeg fridge, furniture made to measure so the kids can cook

Klug found a shop in a picturesque corner of Sedanstraße in Haidhausen and set up a happy nest there. Pink Smeg fridge, furniture made to measure so the kids can cook. Garlands on the wall, stools of different sizes for all ages, heavy enough not to tip over.

In addition to courses on making jam, making pasta yourself or filling advent calendars, the children’s kitchen also offered birthday parties. The child of a journalist celebrated shortly after the opening in 2004, she wrote an article and the children’s kitchen became a sure-fire success. One day, a master painter who was just freshly painting the rooms complained to her about his suffering: In the parents’ initiative, where his children were looked after, the parents had to take turns cooking lunch – couldn’t she do that? And so catering was born.

The children’s kitchen soon supplied almost the entire district. By bicycle

One parent initiative became two, the kindergarten around the block also wanted to be supplied. Soon the children’s kitchen supplied almost the entire district by bicycle. “We cooked on four hotplates and with two ovens, always by feel,” says Susanne Klug. By 2016 it was clear: a larger kitchen was needed for the catering. They found rooms in Balanstraße with a functional stainless steel kitchen.

In the meantime, Susanne Klug was a mother of two children, had stood in Sedanstrasse until she gave birth and later discussed daily routines with the baby in her arms. During the week she was often alone with the boys because her husband was still working in Aschaffenburg. It sounds borderline, but “it didn’t bother me that much,” she says.

Soon her husband decided to leave his job in the fashion industry and be in Munich full-time and work with her. More and more establishments wanted their food, so that the Balanstraße became too small. They moved to an old factory in Sendling, where soap and perfume had previously been made. “The smell lingered in the rooms for weeks,” says Klug. They already had 20 employees, today there are 47.

“We peel the potatoes, make the dumplings ourselves, chop the vegetables”

The food tastes like home made because it is home made. “We peel the potatoes, make the dumplings ourselves, chop the vegetables.” Schnitzel and fish fingers go through the in-house breading machine. The lasagna is layered by hand.

The guarantee of home-made is certainly one of the reasons for its success. And thinking along with processes and parents’ wishes is probably another. Children should eat a varied and healthy diet, ideally getting to know something new on the plate. And all of this has to be structured and organized in such a way that the educators don’t have too much work to do. How do you do that? For example with colors.

With bright pink raspberry dressing, children are also interested in salads, and in raw vegetables when they are presented elegantly and appetizingly. The components of the dishes are individually packed, so a child with a pronounced sauerkraut aversion, for example, can still eat the Schupfnudeln. Less seasoning is used for the very little ones and some things are adapted: no beans or legumes because of the risk of swallowing, many things are cut smaller. There is special food for children with allergies, and a feedback form is used to ask how the new dishes were received.

The questionnaires sometimes read as if they were copied from motivational seminars, and then it says: “The loving way you prepare our food every day is amazing!”, or “Your food was delicious again this week, you are really great, Thanks very much!” Sarah Kraus from the administration of the “Seepferchen”, a subsidized private institution with nine facilities in Munich, says: “The food is something different than the 0815 food of other caterers, not industrially manufactured, but really lovingly made.” Salads, snacks and desserts can be booked, but do not have to be. “It’s not all organic, but a lot is. As regional as possible, no sauce thickeners, nothing like that,” says Kraus. “And varied. Where else should the children be introduced to fresh, good food if not in the crèche?”

In the children’s kitchen there were courses on making jam, making pasta yourself or filling advent calendars.

(Photo: (c)Ulrike Schmid, Sabine Mader)

Then Corona came. In order to keep their employees busy, they delivered to parents who were working from home with their offspring. Elaborate, not really economical, but it kept the business running.

Susanne Klug describes herself as “what you would call brilliant”, and she is apparently also in relation to herself. If she is in a good mood and passionate about what she is doing, she can run a small company with two small children and write columns at the same time. But when worries pile up and external circumstances press, she knows when to look to herself and pull the ripcord. And the way employees approach her in the hallway suggests she cares about the needs of others as much as she cares about herself.

During the pandemic, a realization matured in her: The children’s kitchen in Sedanstraße can no longer go on. “It was really difficult for me,” says Susanne Klug. “I cried a lot.” After 17 years, infinitely many crooked witches’ houses and ravioli cut with the utmost concentration, many cooking course children who later turned up as interns in the children’s kitchen and after a few wine spritzers that she drank with her employees in front of the shop window on mild evenings after the courses, she closed the door for the last time in November 2021.

One or the other can not believe it and keeps asking her when she will open a children’s cooking school again. “But I couldn’t do that again,” says Klug. She dedicates herself to new projects. She is currently writing a new cookbook. She recently put the vegetarian dish at the top of the list, and vegetarian orders have already grown from 10 to 15 percent.

“Maybe they discovered my love of cooking,” she sometimes thinks when she sees young adults on the street, and that’s important to her. She also wants some things, but she doesn’t succeed: getting her sons excited about sushi and salad, for example. A degree in ecotrophology doesn’t help either. But maybe one day the time.

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