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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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Schools offer good lunchtime opportunities, especially if you're catering to ravenous students, as Angela Dominick, chef and owner of Dom's Trattoria in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, does.

For the last two school years, Dominick, whose 22-seat restaurant is located in a small community with many private schools, has been providing a lunch to four of these via a lunch program she helped establish. Currently, 570 children are registered in the program, which offers healthy eating options, including gluten-free pizzas.

The schools lacked cafeterias, so students were brown-bagging it. Some parent-customers brought her to the attention of one school, and opportunity expanded from there. Parents order and pay for the lunches on her Web site; Dominick and her employees (three, including her, handle the lunch program) package the food in color-coded bags, delivering it to each school.

Getting involved in school charity auctions helped shine attention her way, says Dominick. Rather than simply providing meal gift certificates, she gave away group cooking lessons to couples, affording her a fun way to build relationships.

The school lunch program has made a big difference to her lunch daypart, says Dominick. It not only increased her revenues, but also her exposure. For example, she also participates in back-to-school nights at these private schools, talking to parents about her restaurant and her approach to food/nutrition.

Her advice? Rethink charitable giving.

"A lot of people think of charities as a headache and just give away gift certificates," Dominick says. "But if you use them correctly, they're a real opportunity."

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Outsourcing lunch is a hot-button topic in schools. But few have gone as far as a handful of North Shore private schools that have contracted with Dom's Trattoria in Beverly Farms to offer restaurant-quality food to their students. Chef and owner Angela Dominick prepares child-friendly meals for Glen Urquhart, Waring School, Cape Ann Waldorf School, Stoneridge Montessori, and Harbor Light Montessori.

These institutions lack on-site kitchen facilities (fewer than half of Boston public schools have full kitchens). Most public schools that have no kitchens bring in food from a commissary or outside contractor. In that sense the situation is no different from the schools Dominick serves, except that she’s using whole-grain products, cutting sugar and sodium, and adding fiber and fresh vegetables.

She offers the lunchroom staple American chop suey, jazzing it up with purple cauliflower. Her mac and cheese also leans on cauliflower, pureed in the creamy cheese sauce. Whole grains rule, and garden salads with tuna or grilled chicken are always an option. Parents or students go online at the beginning of each week and place their orders on Dominick’s website.

The chef makes stock from scratch and uses no frozen products. She thinks her model can work for public schools, too, and says she would "be more than willing to work with a public school department." And, she says, "I can do it for about the same price kids would pay for lunch in public school."

Certainly, much of what Dominick does could work in any lunchroom. But her menu prices for a hot meal range up to $5, while a hot meal at Beverly High School is $2.75. In order for Dominick to meet public school prices, she would have to retool her menu.

She says, however, it's more about will than economics: "I truly believe that all it really takes is just a little bit of extra effort."

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BEVERLY — As a young girl growing up in Maine, Angela Dominick learned the food business by working in restaurants owned by her family. Whenever she complained, her father ordered her to stand in front of a mirror and practice speaking in a more civilized tone.

Those childhood lessons, both culinary and oratory, are now paying off. Dominick is not only the chef and owner of her own restaurant. She's also the host of her own local cable TV cooking show.

"La Cucina Famiglia" (The Family Kitchen) is produced by Beverly Community Access Media and is shown in about 40 communities on the North Shore. Dominick has taped seven shows, using the home kitchens of some of her customers as the setting.

Yesterday, she co-hosted the show along with Rob Worsley, the sous chef at Dom's Trattoria, the Beverly Farms restaurant co-owned by Dominick and her husband, Ralph. Inside the kitchen of local architect John Margolis, the pair whipped up Sicilian and Thai versions of Dominick's homemade fish stew.

The show's producer, Don Berman, said Dominick is a natural in front of the camera.

"What you're looking for is a personality, and Angela has that charisma," Berman said. "You need somebody who can talk while they're working. Angela has those qualities."

To Dominick, the cooking show is a natural outgrowth of her desire to share her love and knowledge of food. She has invited kids into her restaurant for make-your-own pizza parties and is allowing a former waitress the use of her kitchen to develop her own granola business.

"I grew up in Maine, and I try to bring as much community and small-town-ness to everything I do," Dominick said. "If you do something and you're passionate about it, it's important to share."

Dominick opened her own restaurant in Kennebunk in 1994 and ran it with her late father, whom she called her "best friend and business partner." In 2003, she married Beverly Farms native Ralph Dominick, and three years later they opened Dom's Trattoria on West Street in Beverly Farms square.

Dominick said her ingredients are all locally grown and all her dishes are homemade. "If we don't make it," she said, "we don't sell it."

She said she strives to create a family atmosphere, with an emphasis on children. (She has no children herself, but "lots of nieces and nephews.") She has volunteered to create lunches at local nursery schools and is in the running to develop the lunch program at two local private schools.

"It's important to teach children that meals don't come out of a box on a shelf," she said.

Dominick acknowledges that her cable cooking show is good marketing for her restaurant. But she also wants to make the wider point that food should be an experience shared by the entire family.

"It's all about wanting to get people back around the dinner table," she said.

Staff writer Paul Leighton can be reached at 978-338-2675 or by e-mail at pleighton@salemnews.com.

Angela Dominick and Rob Worsley demonstrate cooking during the "La Cucina Famiglia" cooking show being shot in a Beverly kitchen for an upcoming episode.

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PUBLISHER LINK: www.BeverlyFarms.org

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