Thursday 19 April 2012

We started this week with our first wet gardening day. Some of our students stayed in class and started to work on their kitchen and garden journals; others started to make a mosaic table. We have an old table in our shed and plan to decorate it with mosaic tiles.
The weather brightened by Monday afternoon and Red and Orange Classes were able to come down to the garden. Everyone was very excited to see how much our plants have grown over the Easter break. Jed was especially pleased to discover that the corn has ripened!




We harvested a wide variety of vegetables for cooking this week:
  • green tomatoes
  • cabbage
  • basil
  • tomatoes
  • capsicum
  • corn
  • parsley
As well as harvesting we did the following:
  • planting carrot seeds
  • weeding
  • removing dead plants
  • composting
  • paper shredding (for the compost)
  • watering
  • feeding the worms in our worm farm

Nick harvests a cabbage for coleslaw


Jackson harvested a cabbage for coleslaw

Regan harvested green tomatoes

And a third cabbage was harvested by Nick for coleslaw

Billy shredded paper for our compost heap

Jo and Billy (that's Billy behind the paper!!) put the shredded paper onto the compost heap

Shannon discovered that the sweet corn has ripened

Litiani inspected the harvest table

Patrick enjoyed using the food processor to shred vegetables for the coleslaw

Litiani making coleslaw

H

Liam whisked eggs for frittata

R

Stevan made ravioli

Darcy made mini frittatas and carried them very carefully to the oven

Rochelle made mini frittatas

Ryan cooked fried green tomatoes

Ryan enjoyed his fried green tomatoes!









Hugo cracked eggs for frittata

Rochelle cracked eggs for frittata


Our menu this week was:
Fried Green Tomatoes with Yoghurt
Coleslaw
Pizza Scrolls
Mini Frittatas
Pumpkin Ravioli

 As usual everyone enjoyed most of the food. Green tomatoes were a 'first' for just about all of us and we were pleasantly surprised by their delicious taste. The filling for the ravioli was particularly tasty - we think we might use the same recipe for a dip later on.
This was our first week of making ravioli - a bit tricky, but successful!

Next week we will be cooking:

Sweetcorn and artichoke fritters with crisp sage leaves and herb yoghurt
Pizza Scrolls
Mini Vegetable Frittatas
Salad of the Imagination
Ravioli with spinach and ricotta filling

Like the green tomatoes, I think the Jerusalem artichokes will be a first for many of us - Sally kindly donated them to us. Our salad will be a little different next week too - students will be provided with a range of ingredients and will select what they would like to use.

Wednesday 4 April 2012

Our fourth week and we have yet to find something that our students don't enjoy eating!! This week we cooked:

Mediterranean vegetables stuffed with spicy rice
Beetroot pasta with herb sauce
Pizza of the imagination
Leafy Salad
Apple Crumble with low fat Natural Yoghurt
Litiani rolls the dough for pizza


Regan is making apple crumble

Shannon using the food processor for the apple crumble


Josh making stuffed vegetables


Ellen tasting the salad

Ryan making stuffed vegetables

Billy doing a great job making pizza

pink and green class enjoying lunch

Jo cutting the pizza

Jo was very proud of his pizza



The stuffed vegetables included zucchini, squash, tomatoes and pumpkin and all were thoroughly enjoyed. The beetroot pasta was fun - a great colour (until it was cooked!) and of course provided an opportunity to use the ever popular pasta machine. We had some lovely flowers to add to our leafy salads this week. Pizza and apple crumble enjoyed too of course.

In the garden we have been busy building scarecrows – our latest is a lady who we have called ‘Libby’ – a very glamorous lady with long eyelashes and painted nails!!
Stevan harvested some peas

Ellen did a fantastic job cleaning our the trailer

Cameron did some mulching with Regina

Riley moved compost from one bay to another


Our new scarecrow

We have planted pak choy, mizuna, celery, broccoli, cauliflower, beetroot, pea and onion seedlings and broad bean seeds.
We were very excited to see that our garlic is sprouting already and some of the broccoli that we planted a few weeks ago has started to flower!
Our menus for the last four weeks have been similar so that all students could take a turn at each type of dish, after Easter we will start a new five week rotation and have a slight change of styles.