Week 7 Term 3 2013

 

Spring has arrived!!

 

This week we cooked:

Gnocchi with Spinach and Ricotta

Grissini

Italian Vegetable Stew

Moroccan Chickpea and Quinoa Salad

Corn and Herb Fritters with Tomato Relish

We were all much more confident with the gnocchi this week and it has been perfect every day! Students are really enjoying the hands-on opportunities that making gnocchi provides. Here you can see Jo removing the cooked gnocchi from the saucepan and Bella adding gnocchi to be cooked.

 

Grissini were very popular and good fun to prepare – they arrived on the table in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but no-one complained!!

We have cooked the Moroccan Chickpea and Quinoa (pronounced Kin-wah) Salad several times and students and staff love it. For those of you who are not familiar with Quinoa, it is often called a ‘superfood’  because of its high nutritional value. It is a seed that is high in protein and a good source of fibre, phosphorous, magnesium, calcium and iron. It is gluten free and considered easy to digest. Because of all these characteristics, Quinoa is being considered a possible crop in NASA’s ‘Controlled Ecological Life Support System' for long-duration human occupied spaceflights! Quinoa is a seed and can be grown in the same way as bean sprouts – it resembles alfalfa in looks if you grow it and is great on salads. But most important of all, it tastes delicious!

Our fritters were much enjoyed by all; the tomato relish went really well with them.

 

And here are some photos of our students eating the food that they have prepared. We are almost at the point of taking it for granted that all will sit at the table, serve themselves with food and water and display excellent table manners. It is real a pleasure to sit with these young people and share a meal with them.

 

 

 

There has been lots of activity in the garden this week. Excellent mulching work was done by Vinnie, Regan and Patrick. I should mention that before the mulching could be done the boys had to steer their wheelbarrows to the mulch mound – no easy task on what is at present a building site!!

 

 

 

We always encourage students to explore the garden and to use all of their senses – it was good to see Matthew smelling the herbs so carefully.

 

 

 

Jack worked on our weather board this week and did a great job.

 

 

The chickens continue to thrive. We purchased a new metal feeder for them this week – far more sturdy than the plastic one that we had previously and also much more ‘student friendly’. Here you can see Jason delivering the new feeder, a bag of food and a new water bucket to the chooks.

 

 

We continue to sow more seeds – summer harvesting is going to be exciting!