The last few months in the kitchen

We have had some wonderful produce harvested from our garden to work with. Our focus has been on fine tuning our knife skills, following a recipe, using our initiative and working well as a team. Many children have learnt how to julienne and chiffonade.
Here are some photos of the delicious food we have produced. All recipes can be found in the Recipes links to the right.

                                 Corn and cherry tomato salad with basil oil and garlic bruschetta

Banana bran muffins using our school grown bananas

                                      Al Browns Condensed milk and apricot slice

 Silverbeet and tomato frittata                                                            Seedy slaw

              Autumn Harvest brown rice salad and silverbeet, feta and potato filo parcels

Making Appleslaw

Year 4 Silverbeet pizza

Herb sorting

Calzone ready for the pizza oven and the finished product - Yum!

                                     Kumara, kale and quinoa fritters with a ginger dipping sauce

                                                                Braised vegetables

                                                    Meringues with feijoa and lime zest

Welcome 2018

We have just completed our first Garden to Table menu for the year!

It has been wonderful seeing all the friendly familiar faces of the Year 5 children and welcoming the bright enthusiastic faces of the Year 4 children at their first Garden to Table session.

We have welcomed new volunteers and are thankful to those returning volunteers who supported us last year and are helping out again this year.

Corn, carrots, beetroot, coriander, chives, basil, onions and apple cucumber were harvested.

Year 4 children learnt about knife safety in the kitchen and prepared crudites, hummus and date and apricot bliss balls. All recipes can be found in the Year 4 recipes section in this blog.
Year 5 children were reminded of the knife techniques they learnt last year and put them into practice to produce a fresh tomato and corn salsa, homemade tortilla chips and apple and cinnamon pinwheel scones.

In the garden, Year 4 children walked around the school looking at all the different gardens and areas that they will become familiar with, and they learnt about seeds.
Year 5 gardeners did a variety of jobs. Different classes watered, weeded and turned the compost, emptied the worm bins and prepared the bokashi buckets for the kitchen.

We have had lots of lunchtime helpers: cutting back weeds, sorting seeds, preparing nametags and painting pictures. Georgia and Anastasia in Year 6 are organising a lunchtime Garden to Table club to be held on a Wednesday, so look out for information on that to be outlined soon.

The whole school Term 1 concept is Ako which is a Maori term that describes a teaching and learning relationship. All children have been put in to a group of 4 or 5 and have started to learn together and build relationships that they will work on throughout the year. They will get to understand each others strengths and work together to grow, harvest, prepare and share.

October and November

As part of bee month, Mrs Masters made beeswax candles with the children. They loved the feel and smell of the beeswax as well as learning lots about the special creatures!

Mrs Masters, Bob and the gardeners have been super busy moving mulch to cover the paths by the greenhouse, the Pollinator garden, vegetable gardens and in areas around the school like under the marble run. It has been hot work! They have all worked so hard. It is important the job is done with the school holidays coming up and with the heat of summer approaching fast. We want the plants to be protected over the summer break.

The first of the seasons broadbeans are being harvested. Delicious!
Silverbeet is being harvested for Depot as they are using our silverbeet for a dish on their menu this year. Year 5 groups of children are loving the chance to visit!

Year 5 classes made their own pasta and produced some wonderful dishes - all recipes can be found on this blog:
Spring vegetable lasagna
Roasted carrot ravioli

Herbed green polpette with a minted tomato sauce on fettucine
Silverbeet and butterkin rotolo

Year 4 and 5 have made Vietnamese fresh rice paper rolls and Year 5 made a delicious Vietnamese pho.

The last of the seasons rhubarb was used to make a yummy tart by Year 4's and a rhubarb sponge by the Year 5's.

Goodbye Winter...Welcome Spring

It has been an eventful couple of months at Garden to Table. We have hosted lots of visitors, cooked some delicious food using some amazing produce from the garden and spent a lot of time in the garden feeding the soil and preparing it for planting the seeds we have been germinating.

Linda Taylor, Al Brown and Andrew Keaney from T and G Global visited the school to produce the video to promote the NZ Young Gardener of the Year competition. We had a load of fun and are putting together our applications now to enter the competition!

https://younggardenerawards.co.nz/

 T and G Global donated an apple tree to all GTT schools. The children planted our tree in our new Pollinator Garden which is beyond the Butterfly Meadow. We have been given various types of manure - pigeon poo and horse manure which has been used to feed the soil and we have used peastraw from Matangi School in Tamahere to mulch all our gardens. Coffee grounds from Al Browns restaurants are being used as a fertilizer along with worm tea from our worm farms. Our apple tree will grow a treat! 

We have had many comments on how fertile the soil looks in the gardens and how lush the vegetables look. All our mulching and feeding of the soil is paying off.
Podgardening.co.nz has some great advice on composting and nourishing the soil.

A big thanks to Kelvin from Sunhill Gardens sunhillgardencentre.co.nz who has donated broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower seedlings that we have planted in the Gingko garden and to all those families that have donated lemons, limes, oranges and grapefruit.
Chantal Organics chantalorganics.co.nz donated some wonderful organic products - Apple Cider Vinegar, Tamari Sauce and Sesame Oil that we have used in the kitchen. Delicious!

 Quinoa Fried Rice                                     Pot Sticker Dumplings

Year 5 groups and their mise en place pronounced (MEEZ ahn plahs), means to have all your ingredients prepared and ready to go before you start cooking. Translated, “ to put in place.”

Dehydrating wood ear fungus

Chinese visitors

In mid August our exchange students from Ningbo, Shanghai joined in with Room 35 and experienced a Garden to Table session. Harvesting, painting signs and planting seeds. All working together as a team, the language barrier didn't matter!

 In the kitchen we used freshly harvested cabbage, mint, sorrel and parsley to make a Seedy slaw, we baked apples and made a star anise custard and used harvested Jerusalem artichokes, a pumpkin from our garden and kumara to make a Roasted vegetable pasta