Week 3 Term 3

This week we made

Seasonal Soup

Pasta with Spinach and Ricotta

Brussels sprouts, Salami and Cheese Pizza

Waldorf salad

Cauliflower and Broccoli Cheese

 

 

We had a wide variety of soups – some with lots of root vegetables such as carrots and swede, others included pumpkin and twice we had corn, potato and leeks. All delicious of course and all very popular with our students.

 

We have started to harvest our own cauliflowers and broccoli so the inclusion of the cauliflower and broccoli cheese was timely.

 

 

 

 

We were delighted to receive two donations this week, both from Peter McInnes the distributors for KitchenAid in New South Wales. They have given us a Deluxe Hand Blender valued at $250 and a pasta roller attachment for our stand mixer valued at about $80. We use a hand blender almost daily, for soups and also to blend foods for some of our students so a really powerful one will be of great use. Whilst we love our hand operated pasta machine, the electric attachment will increase opportunities for student participation greatly.

 

The chickens are continuing to be very popular – everyone seems very pleased when it is their group’s turn to work with them.

An escaping student!!

 

 

Dorothy the Dinosaur visited us in the garden this week (Thomas in disguise!!). Dorothy did a fantastic job harvesting broccoli!

Dorothy visited the chooks too!

 

A word or two about our latest pizzas. We were beginning to find that when we included ‘Pizza of the Imagination’ in our menu students were tending to put a huge variety of items on the pizza and they were tending to get a little soggy. We decided to choose specific topping for this five week block and so far the pizzas have been far crisper. Several of the recipes came from an article I found on the internet called “A Pizza Snob’s Approach to Toppings” – a great article which you could easily find by doing a Google Search. In the article the writer talks about many people taking the “kitchen sink approach” to toppings for pizzas whereas he has a number of rules in his ‘philosophy of toppings’:

·         Whatever is added must be more flavourful than the item below it

·         No single topping should be so strongly flavoured that it masks the flavour of those that come before it

·         No raw watery vegetables such as zucchini, tomatoes, etc.

·         Onions usually need to be caramelized unless very thinly sliced

·         Meat should be in chunks, not slices

·         There is a lot of debate about cheese – some prefer chunks, others grated; also there seems to be a lot of debate about whether it should go on first or last. The main rule is that it should not be overcooked – it should just melt so that the mozzarella is ‘stringy’

 

 

 

And finally some more photos:

Ellen filled pots with seed raising mix