Recipe: Monster Breakfast Cookies

Posted on October 20, 2026

Schools across Vermont serve thousands of meals every day, and many are working to include more local ingredients in those meals. In fact, Vermont schools have increased their purchase of local foods almost 10% in the past 10 years—now, on average, 14% of purchases are coming from local farms and producers.*

One staple ingredient used among schools is grain, like flour and oats, for scratch-made pizza doughs, granolas, buns, rolls, breads, muffins, and more.

Windham Southeast Supervisory Union has developed recipes to help school kitchens cook from scratch with local grains, including these Monster Breakfast Cookies from Assistant Director of School Nutrition Kelsey Baumgarten.

A group of people standing around a commercial kitchen table, watching as one person demonstrates with a knife. The table has trays of baked goods, including cookies.

Kelsey shares her recipes for incorporating local grains and beans into baked goods during her workshop at the Vermont Agency of Education's Child Nutrition Summer Institute, August 2026.

“We first came up with the idea for Monster Cookies because we wanted to create an all-in-one breakfast cookie that would credit for a full serving of grain and accommodate gluten-free and vegan diets,” explains Kelsey.

She shared her recipe with fellow school nutrition professionals at the Vermont Agency of Education’s Summer Child Nutrition Institute in August. Her workshop covered practical strategies for using local grains in school meals, and ideas for further recipe development. “We’re now experimenting with swapping local cornmeal in for some of the rice flour, which is not available locally, to get even more local ingredients into the recipe.”

“Being part of the school nutrition program is the way I can do everything. I was once a farmer, and then I was a baker, I was a dietitian. My role now is a way to bridge all of those and make the biggest impact possible.”