Delicious Broad Beans!

This week we cooked:

Pizza of the Imagination

Beetroot and Orange Salad

Green Couscous with Broad Beans, Dill and Pistachios

Curried Eggs

Artichoke Cheese Puffs

We used the last of our beetroots for the salad this week – finally we will stop have stained red fingers!

Talking of fingers, Hugo was very proud of his egg yolk fingers when he made curried eggs! We always encourage our students to mix by hand (who needs food mixers when you have hands!!) if possible and Hugo certainly got the message. He also followed our directions to taste the food while making it really well! And after such enthusiasm how could we deny him the pleasure of scraping out the bowl!!

The curried eggs were a good inclusion in the menu – lots of great activities such as peeling the eggs, mashing the yolks and re-filling the eggs. AND they tasted great!

Rochelle carefully removed the shells from the eggs

Jackson was very gentle when he removed the shells from the eggs

Our Green Couscous with Broad Beans, Dill and Pistachios was a very interesting and very tasty recipe. We were able to harvest lots of broad beans in our garden, plus dill and spring onions. Students really enjoyed shelling the beans and the pistachio nuts – and the rule of “one for me and one for the pot” definitely applied!

Green Couscous with Broad Beans, Dill and Pistachios

Cameron was cautious of the pistachios initially, but then really enjoyed them.

Another really interesting recipe was the one for Artichoke and Cheese Puffs. We have planted artichokes in our garden but won’t be harvesting until this time next year, but Gabrielle was able to bring in artichokes donated to us by one of her neighbours. Students were really interested in the strange looking vegetable and how different the ‘heart’ was. The puffs were really delicious. It was good to see the teamwork that happened when they were being made. In the photo below you can see Nick peeling the plastic from the frozen pastry sheets, Steven mixing the cheesing filling and Cody putting the puffs together.

Regan was great at peeling the plastic from the frozen pastry too

Cody investigated a whole globe artichoke!

Artichoke Cheese Puff

In the garden we planted pumpkins (it seemed the right time as it was Halloween!). We planted seeds called “The World’s Largest Pumpkin Seeds” – perhaps we will be able to enter them into a competition!

Jackson watered the pumpkin

We had a very warm day on Monday and so Orange Class worked with Red Class in their Sensory Garden, removing overgrown and dead plants and watering.

Jed and Kayla helped with the sensory garden

We were very pleased to see William participating so well with making the couscous – he was very interested in the lemons. And later at the table he showed a lot of interest in the oranges and the beetroots.

Cody was a fantastic help with composting this week – she got really involved in adding shredded paper to our compost heap.

Shannon asked if he could make his own Pizza of the Imagination this week – it was good to see the initiative shown - Well Done Shannon!!

We have been continuing to practice our knife skills too.

Billy and Tash chopped spring onions

In the classroom we have been using our interactive white boards before going to the garden and kitchen classes to learn about what we will be cooking and harvesting. The activity started with students having to ‘find’ what they were cooking by choosing and touching any of 16 buttons on the whiteboard – if they chose the wrong ones they were told that they would be cooking things such as spiders, horses or elephants for lunch! Once they had ‘found’ all their recipes they had to match the recipes to photos of the groups that would be making them. And finally they looked at the actual recipes – one activity involved actually ‘putting’ the ingredients into the breadmaker by dragging photos of the ingredients to a photo of a breadmaker.

We were very excited to learn that Wendy (our Kitchen Specialist) had been awarded second prize for her jam and second prize for her cake in the Royal Hobart Show this week – Well Done Wendy!!

And next week we will be cooking:

Pea, feta and quinoa spring rolls with roast tomato nam prik
Potato salad with broad beans and herbs
Gado Gado
Bread Rolls
Silverbeet in olive oil with chick peas and currants

Thank you to Annette who suggested the spring roll recipe!!

And finally here are one or two more photos: