Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Program

This week we made:

Gnocchi with Tomato Herb Sauce
Grissini
Broccoli Fritters with Yoghurt & Mint Sauce
Cheesy Vegetables
Silver beet in Olive Oil with Chick peas and Currants

Gnocchi seems to be getting easier and better every week! We are beginning to think that all of the talk about using special potatoes and how to cook them is a bit of a myth – we have been using any old potatoes this week and have just been peeling and boiling them (instead of the recommended roasting on rock salt) and have had excellent results.

And similarly we simplified the broccoli fritter recipe. It was an adaptation of our cauliflower fritter recipe which called for whole coriander and cumin seeds that then required roasting and grinding – this time we used ready ground coriander and cumin and it was just as good. This was probably our best fritter recipe – it adapted easily from the cauliflower one and in fact a variety of vegetables could be substituted.

It was good to have the silver beet recipe again – it was one of the first things we cooked when we started the program and has always been very popular.

I have decided to reduce my workload by repeating menus. In future a menu will be run for two weeks instead of one. So next week we are cooking the same items as this one – I’m sure there will be no complaints!

I must make particular mention of Regan, Kaitlin and Michael this week – all achieved ‘firsts’ during our dining sessions, either by eating or by sitting or both. Well done!

Well done Cameron W for excellent almost independent table setting the week.

Our dicers continue to be heavily used!

I was very impressed with Liam this week – his use of the microwave was very good.

Big congratulations also to Jo who made broccoli fritters with very little support. I cracked the eggs and Jo split them apart, I held the blender and Jo pressed the button, Jo counted while I added ingredients, Jo fried the fritters.

Lots of excellent teamwork was on display this week – I was especially impressed with Aidan and Litiani.

We had a lot of wet weather this week so some garden classes had to be cancelled. Some good weather recording was completed when classes did run. The weather activity is one that provides a whole range of excellent learning opportunities. The Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation produces books called Tools for Teachers which contain activities that are extensions of the kitchen and garden classes – one of the aims of the Foundation is for schools to integrate the kitchen and garden work into all aspects of student learning. Southern Support School’s work using our weather board is going to be included in the next edition of this book – with photos of Ryan (published in a recent Blog post)! The book is used in schools throughout Australia.

Some classes have been growing broad beans in pots and this week they were very excited to find that their seeds had germinated. Jed was especially pleased!!