News Photo by Temi Fadayomi Alcona Community Schools Elementary Lead Cook Bobbie Fall, left, provides an Alcona Elementary School student with sauce for her chicken pot sticker during the school’s Try Day Friday in the school cafeteria on Friday.

LINCOLN — The children at Alcona Elementary School are embracing the unexpected and expanding their culinary pallets with the school’s Try Day Friday program.

Alcona Community Schools Lead Cook Bobbie Fall said Try Day Fridays started as a desire to provide elementary students with more “scratch meals,” or meals that use fresh ingredients as opposed to additives and preservatives.

Fall started the program by pulling some recipes from U.S. Department of Agriculture-approved websites and worked from there.

According to Crystal Schober, the Alcona Community Schools food core representative, the way Try Day Friday works is that, every Friday, the school makes a scratch menu item available for kids to try if they want to. More conventional food items are made available in case the children aren’t interested.

“The kids really enjoy having Friday and trying something new,” Fall said. “They see the menu and they’re really excited about what’s on it now.”

To further incentivize students to give the new food a chance, students who participate can work their way toward prizes. Every time a student tries a Try Day meal, they get a punch on a card. If a student gets five punches, they receive a small prize.

“Bobbie punches a card for any student that tries a Try Day Friday,” Schober said. “When they get to five, they get to pick a prize and then, when they get another five, they get to pick out another prize, along with a little extra prize. The more you try, the more the prize.”

Students get to vote on whether they like or dislike the dish using colored chips, according to Fall, with blue chips indicating the students liked the meal and yellow indicating they didn’t. If a dish is popular enough, Fall said it can be incorporated into the regular menu.

“Kindergarten through fifth grade gets to vote,” Fall said.

According to Schober, Try Day Friday has brought the students exposure to meals like chicken tortilla soup, pretzel hot dogs, hashbrown casserole, and stuffed cabbage.

After more than a year of doing Try Day Friday, Fall said she is not only having the kids enjoy the food but they are even coming up with some items on their own.

On Friday, the students enjoyed chicken pot stickers. According to Fall, that dish was recommended by one of the fourth-graders.

“This is now the end of our second school year doing this,” Fall said. “The students are really excited about what’s coming up.”