2020 begins

What a great start to 2020! 

The excited faces of the Year 4 children as they have experienced their first sessions in the garden and kitchen, and the attitudes and skills of the Year 5 children who are in their second year of the programme. We have been super impressed. 

We are so thankful to have so many amazing volunteers. Parents who come regularly, those who take time off work to help out, grandparents and community volunteers. Even visiting family from overseas!

Pizza and Pasta

The gardeners have been super busy. Planting, mulching, tidying the gardens and plenty of watering. Harvesting of a variety of salad greens, silverbeet, kale, cavalo nero, parsley, mint, coriander, spring onions, chives, sprouting broccoli, beetroot and new seasons asparagus.

 In the kitchen we have made pizza and homemade pasta. It has been a busy term of visitors. We hosted a Garden to Table Open Day and had a large group of interested people through who were amazed by what all the children had been doing. Year 13 Food Technology students from Mahurangi College ventured down to Auckland and spent the day teaching the children how to make pasta.

Citrus crazy and the Root to Tip Competition

Meadowbank School (and Mrs Masters and Mrs Crews especially) are super proud of the 2 teams that made it into the Regional finals of the annual Root to Tip competition roottotip.org.nz open to all Year 5 and 6 children nationwide. The judges were highly impressed with the talents of all the participants and although they didnt make it through to the final they should be so pleased and proud of their achievements. We were impressed with their skills and the the knowledge they have of using seasonal food from the root to the tip!We are also proud of the many teams that entered but didnt make it through. Well done to all.
The citrus fruit this year is amazing. We have lots of lemons on our own school trees and have been gifted lots more lemons, grapefruit, oranges, tangeloes and limes.
We used them in the kitchen to make a delicious lemon curd that we served on homemade mini pancakes. Lemon cordial, crunchy lemon muffins and lime shortbread have also been on the menu.

Braised seasonal vegetables with coconut and coriander rice was popular too. Gardeners harvested 15-19 different vegetables from the garden for this dish!

Welcome Winter

Soup and warming dishes full of our winter harvests have been on the menu. Kumara, silverbeet, coriander, spring onion, Jerusalem artichokes, mint, celery, kale, rosemary, sprouting broccoli, courgette harvested from our garden and pumpkin and choko that we had been gifted.
Versatile vegetable soup with a parmesan twist, Hua whenua soup with pakipaki bread and vegetable biryani with kumara and silverbeet dhal and broccoli flatbreads. We made a Matariki fruit crumble using fruit we had stored in our freezer that had been harvested earlier in the year - peaches, nectarines, blueberries and feijoas. Year 4 children learned about mise en place and should be super proud of their knife and measuring skills!

Junior Garden Design

The garden at the entrance to the junior school has been cleared and plans for an attractive, edible garden for both the school and its community are well underway.
If you would like your ideas considered in the planning, make sure you submit a design to the senior office by Wednesday July 24th.

Pizza

Our fabulous Bob has been in stoking up the wood fired pizza oven for both Year 4 and 5's to cook pizzas. He arrives very early in the morning and stays the whole school day to make sure every class has a chance to cook their pizzas in the outdoor oven. On one of the days when we have 3 Year 4 classes in a day he arrived at 6.30am. So early that no one was at school and the alarms hadnt even been turned off! 

 Delicious produce was harvested for a Autumn harvest pizza and Rosemary and thyme pizza bread.

We talked about the science involved in making the pizza dough. One year group has a question about yeast in their Science Quizathon questions so they will certainly get that question right! Thanks to GTT!