Spring flowers

We have been very creative and have produced beautiful observational artwork of the spring flowers in our garden. The colours have brightened the walls of our kitchen and have definately brought the outside inside!

Fabulous vegetables were harvested for our Spring vegetable curry. Rainbow beet, fennel, asparagus, white carrots, celery, Jerusalem artichokes, broadbeans and amazing sprouting broccoli. This was served with rice and radish raita. Lemons from our tree were used to make a lemon curd that we dolloped into homemade mini tartlet cases

Special guests and fabulous volunteers

Over the past few months we have had many visitors observing our GTT programme. Groups of staff and specialists from other GTT schools new to the programme have come along to see how we run our sessions and see the children in action. In mid August we hosted the UAE's Minister for Food Security, Her Excellency Mariam bint Mohammed Saeed Hareb Al Mehairi at the request of the NZ Trade and Enterprise. She was so enthusiastic and very impressed with the programme. We were honored to have her visit.
We made a Quinoa salad with root vegetables and crispy kale, a Winter salad with crispy chickpeas and Fruit and spice baked apples with custard.

 Year 5's Room 21 were very lucky to have Carol's Mum, Vera showing us how to make perfect Pot Sticker dumplings. We filled them with cabbage, spring onions and wood ear fungus we harvested, along with garlic, ginger and soy sauce. They were delicious with a soy, sesame and coriander dipping sauce.

Year 4's had an Indian inspired menu making Curried vegetable fritter, Mint raita and Nankhatai which are eggless buttery Indian cookies

Check out our soil samples taken from different parts of the school. What can you see that is different? Results to follow in the next blog update

Winter months in the garden

We have been busy in the garden feeding and insulating the soil for the winter. Mulching using seagrass collected by Year 6 Waterwise children at Okahu Bay. Feeding the soil with worm castings and worm tea and used coffee grinds.

Planting broadbeans, cabbages, sprouting broccoli and other winter crops and we have been experimenting with growing garlic. Children have made and painted signs so that all the crops that have been planted can be identified.

 We are very excited with how the prepared olives from our school tree have turned out and they were delicious on the wood fired pizzas we made at the end of Term 2.

The Garden to Table Club with our school grown and prepared olives on pizza bread.

Team work!

Preparing persimmons to dehydrate

Bananas growing

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