BEVERLY — Angela Dominick and her team got more than a few "yums" yesterday at Cove Elementary School for what she hopes will be an award-winning, veggie-infused macaroni and cheese.
The 39-year-old Beverly resident will enter the recipe — which uses pureed cauliflower and honey-sweetened carrots and broccoli to add a little hidden nutrition to the tasty comfort food — in a national contest sponsored by Let's Move and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The contest, called the Recipes for Healthy Kids Competition, aims to create tasty and healthy new recipes for inclusion on school lunch menus across the country. About 1,700 submissions are expected.
Dominick is a longtime professional chef with her own Beverly Farms restaurant, Dom's Trattoria, and a local cable TV cooking show. She also prepares daily meals for about 500 private-school students throughout the North Shore.
And she's already thinking about what it will be like when her team wins the healthy kids competition.
"When we make the top 15, we get a White House visit; Michelle Obama, as well as the food service director of the USDA, will come to (Cove) school to meet the kids," Dominick said yesterday.
The top three recipes also win prize money for the school — up to $3,000 — and the top 30 are included in a cookbook, with proceeds all going to participating schools.
Dominick has had the mac and cheese recipe in her repertoire for years but tweaked it a bit with the help of Cove's head chef, Fred Walker, who ensured it fit public school standards. The team also consisted of Cove sixth-grader Alex Rand and his mom, Cheryl, who helped cook, organize and promote the project.
"I heard about the contest a couple of months ago, and at first I didn't think I had the time," Dominick said. "Then I thought, this is something I have to do. If you don't put forth the effort, you won't get the results."
The group initially held a taste test at Dom's Trattoria with about 15 kids to choose whether to submit the mac and cheese, a tomato soup recipe or a beef-and-black-bean burrito recipe for the contest. The mac and cheese won easily.
Yesterday, the group cooked their dish for about 300 students at Cove. Costa Fruit and Produce in Boston donated all of the vegetables for yesterday's feast.
Although mac and cheese isn't typically seen as very healthy, this one, with all of its veggies and whole-grain pasta, has four servings of whole grains, one serving of dairy, four servings of vegetables and two servings of protein.
More important, it was a hit with the Cove students.
"To see the kids pick out the carrots and eat them first because they're so good was really amazing, really rewarding," Dominick said. "We had them rate it on a scale of one to five, from 'yum' to 'yuck.' I was really afraid we'd get a lot of 'yucks' because of the broccoli, carrots and cauliflower puree. But only two (surveys) fell below three. The other 40 were fours and fives, so we're feeling confident."
The winners, and whether Michelle Obama will be coming to Cove, will be announced in March.
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