SAKG News
This fortnight the classes in the kitchen are continuing with our pasta making, this time making hand-rolled spaghetti with a creamy chicken sauce of the imagination. The sauce recipe is a great one to use up spare greens and bits and pieces in the fridge. We used fennel and greens like kale and broccoli florets as well as chives in ours, but you could use mushrooms, add some bacon or anything that you like really, so long as you follow the instructions for the sauce. The kids have enjoyed the opportunity to really showcase their burgeoning knife skills and it is fantastic to see them working so well. Once again, this dish wouldn't work without the hard work of our pasta rollers, who diligently rolled and laminated the dough and then carefully put it through the cutter to make thin spaghetti. It is a fine art to get it not too sticky but not too dry, and it has been a resounding success.
No pasta dish is complete without a good salad to compliment it and we had a delicious version of Caesar salad with extra crunch. The kids chopped up crunchy celery, used a variety of lettuce from the garden, made croutons, along with their own creamy dressing to go with this, just before assembling it. The flavour and crunch were fantastic.
Our meal was completed with a delicious dessert of banana and macadamia cupcakes with lemon myrtle drizzle. The macadamias and lemon myrtle are Australian ingredient that we are learning to incorporate into everyday foods, and we made smaller cupcake sizes instead of a cake so to make the cooking quicker. If you try this recipe at home you can get the lemon myrtle powder from the Source Bulk Food shop in the Eastwood shopping centre, or you can use some lemon zest instead.
The grade 1s are continuing with their pancakes and fruit platters. They are working in teams to make the platters, setting their tables, experiencing the tastes of multiple fruits with their food, before packing up. They are beginning to get a sample of how big kid kitchen classes work and it is very exciting.
We are focusing on planting and weeding in the garden this fortnight as Spring weather is causing an explosion of growth in the garden. Students have been learning about the different ways to plant into the garden. The Grow groups are sowing seeds into punnets. They are also transplanting seedlings into newspaper pots. Native plants such as billy buttons, native mint and thyme and mountain pepper were planted in our indigenous garden. Many wheelbarrows of weeds have been pulled out and fed to the chooks. The Animal groups have been busy looking after the Guinea pigs and chickens. The Guinea pigs had a bath as the weather was a bit warmer. The harvest group has started harvesting snow peas for the kitchen. They have been harvesting a range of herbs and greens as well. And lastly the observe and create groups are creating flower and vegetable seed packets that will be for sale from Week 8. An extra job has been sifting compost and adding it to three new raised garden beds. Kids have been working at this during lunchtime and during garden sessions as well. After Melbourne Cup, we can plant our tomatoes into these new beds. They are in the greenhouse waiting for early November, when the risk of the last frosts has passed.
