National school meals week

I can remember sitting for the whole hour and a half with a plate of meat, cabbage boiled potatoes and thick lumpy gravy which smelt terrible and I can still smell it today. Followed by a dish of sago pudding or semolina with a spoon full of jam which we used to stir round in a frenzy until it was all pink. I've never eaten those puddings again.

Very unhealthy, Sabre! Hot mince pie and chips! Now they don't serve pie and chips most schools have banned chips!! It wasn't healthy at all! Nowadays its all changed its really good my daughter's school is very healthy and what a variety and i've read somewhere that some kids have only one healthy meal at school and not a proper balanced cooked meal at home!!! How sad is that??!!

Ghastly things Sabre,the only thing I did like was the chocolate pudding with a large dollop of pink custard, now that was yummy and probably helped contribute towards my high sugar levels these days.

Primary school dinners were awful in my day, no choice, everything was overcooked and I remember getting a terrible telling off from the headmistress for telling another girl that the unrecognisable object on our plates was 'horsemeat'!!

Senior school dinners were really nice at our school (though not very healthy by today's standards!), I distinctly remember a pudding called 'Alpine Peaks' which was a big white meringue covered in a really sharp raspberry sauce! Yummy! :-)

Ohhh' I remember my high school and primary schools meals!! Never again!!, in high school we always had pizza, in primary school it would be tomato spaghetti pasta! Totally bland!! Yuckk! I remember distinctly that the teachers on portroll would hurry you up and make you eat faster and the other teachers would skip the school all the time, I think that still happens nowadays!! I would of like to try the chocolate pudding with pink custard that LILLIE was talking about!!

Oh how I hated school dinnertimes. I remember the semolina, tapioca, sago etc with a blob of jam in the middle. There was a myth that if you stirred it and stirred there would be less and less in the bowl (didn't work). A vile thing called Manchester Tart, pastry with jam on topped with cold lumpy yellow custard - eeeewwwww. The apple crumble and some other puds were lovely but you HAD to have custard (yellow/brown/pink/white) which made it inedible for me. We were not allowed to leave till every last bit was eaten and I remember still being at the table when lessons had started after dinnertime, even though I was on first-sitting! All because they forced me to have custard/sauce or the sloppy stuff. Still hate it to this day!!

I think I've blocked those memories out. I remember begging my mom for a packed lunch and eventually she gave in. I feel guilty now as an adult - now I understand that we had free school meals and my parents couldn't afford to give us lunch every day. School meals are as much of a disgrace now as they were back then in my opinion, only now they are much more expensive to buy as well.

We used to have Irish stew on a Monday. It was really thin but I loved it. Liver, however, was another story, couldn't bear it then and never eat it now.