Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden (SAKG)

IN THE KITCHEN

We have continued to practise our knife skills in the kitchen as we prepare dishes such as cauliflower fritters, a salad of the imagination, and a shepherd's pie. 

To celebrate the Olympics, we enjoyed a French menu of Ratatouille, bread rolls and pancakes with lemon butter! Yum! 

We are investigating how food in Australia has changed over the last 70 years with the migration of different nationalities. Mrs Fuller and I often tell the students that we never ate particular foods such as avocadoes and broccoli because they weren't readily available when we were growing up! We are watching snippets of the ABC series 'Back in Time for Dinner' and today started with the 1950s. A typical dinner in the '50s was meat and 3 veg, and the students were starting to be a little worried we were going to cook tripe in white sauce!  Luckily for them, shepherd's pie and golden syrup dumplings were on the menu. We could incorporate fresh produce from the garden such as carrots, celery, parsley, silverbeet and cabbage. Check out our special carrots... they definitely belong in the odd bunch!

We'll be exploring different cuisines from around the world as they began to appear in Australia during the following decades.

IN THE GARDEN

Last week was very exciting as we started to plant our new fruit trees with the help of Mr Elliott. After harvesting some veggies and herbs from the garden for the cooking group, we split into two groups. 

Group 1 began wheelbarrowing mulch from our pile over to the garden beds to put around the plants and in between the beds to help keep the weeds.  

Group 2 began digging holes with Mr Elliott and did an amazing job! The hole had to be the depth of the plant and twice as wide. They finished their digging eventually, planted their tree, watered it in, mulched and then they all stood back and admired their great work. Thank you so much Mr Elliott, we couldn't have done it without you! 

Following this the groups swapped over and Group 1 began digging their holes ready to plant the other trees this week but unfortunately it was too wet to do our gardening which was disappointing. We did a variety of activities inside about living in 1950 and  the foods available then compared to today. After this we set up our mushroom kit which was fun. We'll wait now and see how many mushrooms we can grow. Hopefully enough for the kitchen group to use in their cooking.