Another great week!

This week we cooked:

Dolmades with silver beet

Pasta with vegetable sauce

Pizza of the imagination

Leafy Salad

Pumpkin and spinach salad

Pizza and pasta were as popular as ever, but we were delighted to observe our students tuck in to the dolmades and the pumpkin salad also. The vegetable sauce for the pasta changed each day depending on what had been harvested and on the choices of the students and staff doing the cooking - it is great to observe the choice making that is going on here!

Litiani adds some salt to her pumpkin salad



Stevan grates cheese for the pizza



Shannon wonders what the dolmades will taste like



Josh cooking the pumpkin for salad



Jo loved making pasta!



Nick cooked his favorite food!



Rochelle makes pizza



Leafy salad is really very tasty!!



An enjoyable lunch!



Ellen enjoyed the pasta



Stevan enjoyed the salad



We completed lots of jobs in the garden - preparing beds for planting, planting seedlings, harvesting, watering, worm farming, composting and making scarecrows.

Ryan's Harvest

Mmm that smells good!

Planting celery

Michael helps with preparing a bed after it has had a green manure crop in it

Up-dating the weather board

Shannon investigates the sunflower seeds








Litiani checks the rain gauge

And next week's menu:

Mediterranean vegetables stuffed with spicy rice

Beetroot pasta with herb sauce

Pizza of the imagination

Leafy Salad

Apple Crumble

Classes this week

We have had a great week in the kitchen and the garden.

This week's menu:

Tomatoes stuffed with spicy rice

Pasta with zucchini and garlic

Pizza of the imagination

Leafy Salad

Silver beet in olive oil with chickpeas and currents

We have been amazed at how popular the recipes were - students considered to be quite fussy eaters were seen tucking into a whole variety of foods.

In the garden we:

• planted garlic, broccoli, cauliflower, beetroot and lettuce
• harvested tomatoes, zucchini, herbs, pumpkin, silver beet, snow peas and lettuce
• prepared beds for winter planting - this involved chopping down the green manure crops, covering them with soil and hay
• started off a new tray in our worm farm
• brought a scarecrow back to life!!

 
 
 


























And next week we will be cooking:
Dolmades with silver beet
Pasta with vegetable sauce
Pizza of the imagination
Leafy Salad
Pumpkin and spinach salad


Kitchen and Garden Classes Start

Pink and Green Classes and Blue and White Classes participated in kitchen and garden classes this week (menu in previous post). We started each session in the garden. First of all we completed our weather board, recording the temperature, the minimum overnight temperature, the rainfall, soil temperature and then added some visuals of what we thought the weather was like (sunny, cloudy, windy, etc.)

The next activity was to look at each groups jobs for the morning - each involved harvesting for the kitchen class and carrying out a gardening job. Eveyone was very excited to learn that we now have a worm farm too!



Pink and Green Classes Thinking about the Weather



Our Weather Board







Ellen enjoyed harvesting a pumpkin



  

The corn will be ready soon

Regan helped to cover the chopped green manure crop with soil







Hugo and Sabrina harvested pumpkins

Lettuces, cauliflower and peas doing well

Our kitchen class started after morning tea. Students divided into five groups, each preparing a different item from the menu of pizza, pasta, leafy salad, bean salad and stuffed pumpkin(see previous post for details of the menu).

Steven chopping capsicum

Jo and Tiffany Chopping Parsley

Steven and Penny learned how to make pasta

Hugo and Wendy made Pumpkin stuffed with Spicy Rice

Next we set the table - Litiani was a great help.

And then it was time to eat. It was great to see everyone sitting together and enjoying the food that we had harvested and prepared.

Hugo enjoyed the pasta





Shannon served Gayle with pasta

Patrick enjoyed his lunch!

Next week we will be cooking:

Tomatoes stuffed with spicy rice

Pasta with zucchini and garlic

Pizza of the imagination

Leafy Salad

Silver beet in olive oil with chickpeas and currents



A quick summary of the past month

Wow! It has been 4 weeks since the last post! A very busy 4 weeks - setting up the kitchen (photos in next post hopefully), maintaining the existing raised beds and setting up the shed as a temporary garden classroom. And now we are ready to start kitchen garden classes.
Our menu for the 13th and 14th March is:

Baby pumpkins stuffed with spicy rice
Pasta with braised capsicum, tomato and onion sauce
Pizza of the imagination
Leafy Salad
Cannellini beans, tomato and peas

All of the recipes are Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Program recipes or are from her book called Kitchen Garden Cooking With Kids.

Although classes haven't officially started yet, it has been great to see so many of our students visiting and working in the garden. Here are a few photos:

Jed having a taste of the chives!

Darcy and Ryan harvesting tomatoes while Jenni looks on.

Matthew takes great care watering the corn

Darcy watering the chilli plant

Ryan grating cheese for the pizzas that will be topped with herbs and vegetables harvested from the garden.



Josie and Litiani digging the soil that is covering the green manure crop

Regan doing a great job removing weeds

Shannon digging

Litiani weeding

Mini pumpkins

Lettuce, peas and cauliflower

Corn