2021 Recipes

Term 4 2021

Pizza!  The pizza base was crispy and delicious cooked in the wood fired pizza oven.  

Our green pizza is topped with very finely chopped silverbeet, kale, garlic, oregano, and thyme, mixed with a drizzle of olive oil and a couple of pinches of salt (about 1/2 teaspoon salt).  

Our cheese pizza is topped with tomato passata, grated cheese, and sliced vegetables (we used thinly sliced sliverbeet stems and podded broad beans) which are tossed with a drizzle of olive oil and a pinch of salt, then sprinkled over the top of the cheese.  

Yum!  Which pizza was your favourite?

Term 3 2021

Lockdown challenge: 

• Explore your kitchen and find anything that you think could be a seed or might grow a shoot! 
• Write down the names of the things you have found and make some labels.
• Use an egg carton to make a mini planter.  First, add some soil from the garden or some potting or seed raising mix into the cups of the egg carton.  Next, sprinkle your seeds and/or place the things you think might grow a shoot on top of the soil.  Then, sprinkle a little more potting mix on top (just a thin layer).  As you do this, stick the correct label into each of the egg carton cups. Finally, water your mini planter every day and see what grows!  Let me know in the comments what you chose from your kitchen and let me know if anything sprouts or grows!  

Other lockdown ideas: 

The Garden to Table website has some fun activities to do while you are at home.  Use vegetables and scraps to make natural paints for an art project!  Forage kawakawa from your neighbourhood to make tea!  Have a garden at home?  Make a salad of the imagination.  Enjoy!

Week 1: What a great start to the term!  We made food from the Middle East today, and it was delicious.  We made pita bread and topped or filled the pita bread with falafel, lemony silverbeet and parsley salad, and creamy hummus.  The flavours together were amazing.  For dessert we had tasty little carrot and apple cakes.  

Week 2: This week we made Chinese food: Southern China style fried rice, stir fried greens, savoury scallion (green onion) pancakes, and for dessert we made five spice apple cakes.  We loved the food and a lot of us had second helpings because it was so good.  

Week 3: Today we made food from Ireland and Wales. The flavourful vegetable stew was inspired by both Irish Stew and Welsh cawl, and was made with potatoes, leeks, and carrots.  Along with the stew we enjoyed tasty soda bread and an Irish mashed potato dish called colcannon.  For dessert we ate sweet, crispy Welsh cakes.  

Week 4:  Well, we are all back in lockdown so no Garden to Table today!  I'm cooking a vegetable soup for lunch today.  I used: 1/4 crown pumpkin, peeled and cut into chunks; 1 onion, cut into quarters; 1 carrot, peeled and cut into chunks; and two cloves of garlic, smashed, along with one half teaspoon of salt and 2 tablespoons of olive oil.  I'll cook these in my soup pot till they are soft, then I'll add some vegetable stock and cook the stock and vegetables together for another 10 minutes or so.  I didn't have to cut the pieces of vegetables small because I'm going to blend the soup once it's cooked.  I have a stick blender to use but you could also do this with an actual blender or a food processor.  While the vegetables are cooking in my soup pot I'm simmering the peels of the potato, carrot, onion, and garlic in some water to make a vegetable stock, which I will use as the liquid for my soup.  Let me know in the comments what you are cooking during lockdown!  I'm looking forward to cooking with you all again when we are back at school.  xx Sarah

Term 2 2021

Week 1: We used some unique Aotearoa ingredients today: kumara (brought here originally by the first Maori settlers and grown since that time); kawakawa leaves, and karengo seaweed.  We made a fantastic pumpkin and kumara salad and used karengo in the dressing.  If you're making it at home you don't have to use the karengo.  We also enjoyed handmade crackers with kawakawa pesto and a delicious apple crumble.  

Week 2: This week we made Japanese food:  sushi (if you don't have sushi rice you can use any kind of rice), okonomiyaki with okonomiyaki sauce, and dorayaki with apple and ginger filling.  Delicious!

Week 3: Yum- Mexican tacos today!  The filling for the tacos was black beans (frijoles negros) with silverbeet and pumpkin, and guacamole with broad beans.  We made the tortillas using a tortilla press and cooked them in a dry pan.  For dessert we had apple upside down cake with cinnamon.  

Week 4: We made handmade dumplings this week!  We made the dumpling dough, rolled it out with a pasta machine and by hand, and cut it into small circles using the top of a cup.  We then put a spoonful of filling into each circle of dough and pinched it shut.  Then we used a special technique to steam and pan fry the dumplings.  They were very tasty and everyone wanted more.  Along with our dumplings we had stir fried greens with tofu and for dessert we ate five spice apple muffins.  

Week 5: Talofa lava!  We loved our Samoan and Tongan menu today.  We enjoyed a tasty vegetable sapasui (chop suey), palusami, green bananas, and fresh delicious pineapple and kiwi otai.

Week 6: Today we made food from Russia and Eastern Europe.  Borscht is a beetroot, potato, and cabbage soup but actually it contains nine different vegetables!  We enjoyed our borscht with rye and caraway muffins, handmade herb butter, and finished our meal with a kiwifruit Russian jam tart.  

Week 7: All the chairs were set out in the hall today ready for our school production so we ate our meal on mats, picnic style!  The food was delicious and we didn't have any leftovers.  We made Indian and Pakistani food this week: saag aloo (spinach and potato curry), roti, beetroot and carrot raita salad, and carrot halwa pudding.  

Week 8: Happy Matariki!  We celebrated with some kai from Aotearoa.  We ate hua whenua soup with kumara, kanga (corn) bread muffins with puha and kawakawa, and a salad of the imagination.  For dessert we enjoyed Matariki stars fruit cobbler.  

Week 9: We loved all the spices in our Ethiopian food today.  We made injera, and with the injera we ate misir wat (spicy lentil stew)  and atakilt wat (cabbage and potato stew with turmeric and ginger) and timatim (a tomato salad).  Actually Sarah made the injera batter and we cooked it because injera is a fermented flatbread like sourdough, so it took a whole week to make!  For dessert we had delicious apple and olive oil cakes.    

 Term 1 2021

Week 2: This week we used zucchini, potatoes, and tomatoes from our garden to make a Greek briami, which is lots of vegetables and crispy potatoes cooked in olive oil-yum!  We ate this with a feta and yogurt sauce, and Greek style pita bread.  We finished our meal with lemon, honey, and olive oil cakes with fresh figs.  Both the bread and the cakes can be made gluten free by substituting buckwheat flour for the flour.  

Week 4: What a delicious Thai green curry!  We used broccoli and green beans from our garden, and made the curry paste from scratch.  We didn't have kaffir lime leaves so we substituted lemon thyme.  We also enjoyed Thai style sweet corn fritters with sweet chilli sauce that we made from our school-grown tomatoes!  For dessert we had coconut black rice pudding topped with fresh plums and toasted coconut.  

Week 6: Russian and Eastern European menu today.  We really enjoyed the borscht (a delicious vegetable stew with beetroot, potatoes, tomatoes, pumpkin- we substituted pumpkin for carrots, and parsley from our garden), and along with the borscht we had yummy yogurt and rye muffins with caraway seed.  But almost everyone's favourite was the dessert this week- apple, rhubarb, and meringue pirog (please note- there are links to the dough, filling, and meringue recipes within the recipe).  

Week 7: We made some Vietnamese food today.  The carrot salad with spicy Vietnamese mint was a little bit sweet and a little bit sour.  We loved the vegetable bánh xèo which was a crispy Vietnamese rice pancake filled with vegetables and bean sprouts, which we ate with lettuce leaves and a yummy dipping sauce.  For dessert we had a fruit salad which was topped with a very tasty coconut milk sauce called nuoc cot dua.

Week 8: Today Philippa shared some food from her culture and we enjoyed some amazing Ecuadorian food.  The patacones (fried green bananas) were crispy and delicious topped with aji sauce.  We ate that with menestra de porotos (Ecuadorian bean stew).  For dessert we had gatos encerrados ("cats in a blanket"- really a banana-filled doughnut!)  

Week 9: We absolutely loved the Tunisian menu today.  All the food was delicious.  The Tunisian shakshuka was a favourite and it was very delicious with handmade flat bread.  The carrot salad was full of flavour because of the harissa paste we made for the dressing.  Yum!  And for dessert we had apple and olive oil cakes (not a traditional Tunisian dessert but we loved them anyway).  

Week 10: Samoan and Pacific Islands: we had a feast this week!  Palusami, sapasui, green bananas, taro, koko alaisa, and pani popo!  Yum.  We were very full after all that tasty food.