Term 4 2023: Rooms 10, 11, 12
Week 1: Bula! Today we celebrated Fijian language week with some delicious food from Fiji. Kokoda is a very popular dish in Fiji and is a raw fish salad with coconut cream. In our Garden to Table class we made a vegetarian version with tofu but if you make it at home you can make it the authentic way with freshly caught fish. We also enjoyed the dalo (taro) alongside greens in coconut cream. Yum! And the cassava cake that we ate for dessert was sweet and delicious.
Week 2: This week we took a culinary trip to the island of Niue to taste some delicious Niue food! In Niue we might have cooked our food in an umu, but our oven roasted timala (kumara) with garden vegetables was still very tasty! And takihi- yum! Layers of taro and papaya with coconut cream. For dessert we enjoyed coconut cake made from freshly grated coconut!
Week 4: Hand cut noodles with stir fried garden vegetables were a favourite in our Chinese menu today. Alongside the tasty noodles we enjoyed cong you bing 葱油饼 (Chinese scallion pancakes) and for dessert we loved the apple and pear muffins with Chinese 5 spices. Everything tasted delicious!
Week 5: Tacos were a favourite of our Mexican menu this week. We made tortillas using a tortilla press, and topped them with Mexican-spiced beans with silverbeet, and a tangy Mexican coleslaw. Yum! We also loved the caramelised apple and pear upside down cakes that we enjoyed for dessert!
Week 6: Happy Diwali! We loved the Indian food we made today. We made roti to eat with a delicious kohlrabi and potato curry and a vibrantly pink beetroot raita! For dessert we had coconut ladoo that we decorated with edible flowers.
Week 7: Kia ora from Aoteaora this week! We enjoyed taewa with kawakawa pesto, silverbeet and puha pinwheel scones, and pikelets with rhubarb sauce. Yummy!
Week 8: Buenos dias! Today our menu was from the South American country of Chile. We worked together to make delicious empanadas. We rolled out the dough and filled it lots of tasty vegetables, egg, olives, and raisins! For dessert we made a chocolate sauce to drizzle over fruit salad.
Week 9: Today we made Middle Eastern food. Our menu featured mini baked falafel made with broad beans from our garden, handmade pita bread, salad, and hummus. We loved all the flavours put together!
Term 3 2023: Rooms 23, 24, 25
Week 1: We celebrated Matariki today with some delicious kai! We loved the kumara salad with kawakawa dressing made with kumara from our own garden with corn bread. For dessert we used star shaped cookie cutters to make crunchy, lemony matariki star cookies.
Week 2: Today it was cold and stormy so our menu of Russian borscht (vegetable soup with beetroot) along with buckwheat muffins with caraway and coriander seeds, salad of the imagination, and syrniki (Russian cottage cheese pancakes) with kiwifruit jam was perfect. The soup really warmed us up!
Week 3: Kia orana! We celebrated Cook Islands language week with some extremely tasty Cook Islands food. We loved the Cook Islands potato salad, which is pink because there's beetroot in it! We also loved the rukau, though we used silverbeet instead of the traditional taro leaves to make it. We at the rukau with roasted kumara from our garden. For dessert we had pineapple pie. Delicious!
Week 4: We used beetroot, carrot, and rocket from the garden to make vegetable sushi today as part of our Japanese menu. The sushi was delicious and very colourful! We also enjoyed a warm, flavourful miso soup with kumara, silverbeet, and spring onion from our garden. Yum! For dessert we had dorayaki, which are Japanese pancakes. In Japan, dorayaki are often sandwiched together with a red bean paste filling, but we made an apple and ginger filling.
Week 5: We had a lovely European menu that complemented the cold rainy weather we've been having. The vegetarian shepherd's pie was amazing topped with creamy mashed potatoes. The butter braised cabbage from cabbages grown in our garden was delicious too! And the rice pudding we had for dessert was so tasty.
Week 6: This week we enjoyed some fresh and delicious Chinese food with San Choy Bow 生菜包 (lettuce wraps), stir fried greens with rice and chilli crisp, and for dessert we enjoyed steamed pears with cinnamon.
Week 7: This week the kitchen smelled amazing with all the spices we used for our Pakistani menu. The vegetarian nihari with pumpkin was so delicious, and we at that with steamed rice, buckwheat and potato roti (kuttu ki roti) and Pakistani mint and cumin raita. We then learned that carrots can make an amazing dessert- gajar ka halwa, or carrot halwa, tastes almost like caramel, and the cardamom spice added a really nice flavour.
Week 8: Malo e lelei! Today felt positively tropical with our Tongan menu. We loved the sapasui, which we ate alongside baked kumala, kapisi (cabbage) in coconut cream, and for dessert- a sweet, refreshing otai made from pineapple, kiwifruit, and oranges. Yummy!
Week 9: Kia ora! It's Te Wiki o te Reo Māori, and in the kitchen we used several ingredients from Aotearoa. Kumara was the star of the show, with a kumara and chickpea salad, and kumara cakes for dessert. We also had handmade seeded crackers with kawakawa and herb pesto. He reka te kai!
Term 2 2023: Rooms 19, 20, 21
Week 1: This week we made some amazingly delicious Japanese food! We made and enjoyed sushi, okonomiyaki (vegetable pancakes), and candied sweet potato!
Week 2: This week we took a trip to the Mediterranean through food. Our simple version of vegetable moussaka was delicious and actually reminded us a bit of lasagna. The rocket and apple salad of the imagination that we had alongside was crunchy, tangy, and full of fresh herbs- yum! For dessert we loved the fluffy, lemony olive oil cakes.
Week 3: Our school had a week of cultural celebration. At Garden to Table we joined in by making pancakes from around the world! Our pancakes included Vietnamese crispy rice pancakes, Eastern European/ Russian potato pancakes, and French crepes, which we topped with strawberry sauce.
Week 4: The Sri Lankan food we had this week was amazing! Lots of spices flavoured our lentil and coconut curry, and the coconut roti was a perfect side! In Sri Lanka, a much loved garnish is coconut sambol, and we loved its zesty, spicy, coconutty flavour! It made everything taste even more delicious. For dessert we had a deliciously sweet coconut cake.
Week 5: In autumn we have lots of greens growing in the garden so we used kale and silverbeet to make gnocchi with garlicky greens. On the side we had a salad of the imagination made with rocket, mandarins, and kiwifruit and garnished with edible flower petals. The little Italian apple cakes were had for dessert were delicious, too!
Week 6: We celebrated Samoan food and language today with some very tasty Samoan food- Ōwairaka style! We made vegetable sapasui, garden greens in coconut cream, roasted kumala, and sua fa'i, or banana coconut pudding.
Term 1 2023: Rooms 16, 17, and 22
Week 2: He tino reka te kai! Today we made food with some of Aotearoa's unique ingredients. The kanga (corn) and kāreti (carrot) salad was topped with harakeke seeds and had a delicious creamy dressing. We enjoyed a kumara leaf and kawakawa pesto on taewa (potatoes). For dessert, we loved the very tasty kumara cakes made with grated kumara.
Week 3: This week we celebrated the lunar new year (a few weeks late) with some delicious Chinese food. We made jiaozi which are pan fried dumplings (ours were filled with vegetables). The method we used fries and steams at the same time. We made the dumpling wrappers and it was really fun to roll them all out but if you're making them at home you can also buy dumpling or wonton wrappers to make your dumplings. On the side we had a tasty cucumber salad with chilli crisp, and for dessert we loved the Chinese egg cakes with red rhubarb sauce.
Week 4: International pancake day was this week and by lucky coincidence, we happened to make two different kinds of French pancakes. One was a savoury pancake/flatbread called socca, made from chickpea flour, caramelised onions, and rosemary. We also made crepes and topped the crepes with strawberry sauce made from our garden strawberries cooked with just a little sugar. Alongside the pancakes we had omelettes with fresh herbs and warm lentil salad, which everyone loved!
Week 5: Today we used green beans and tomatoes grown in our garden to make Bihari green bean masala and chana masala. Both of these dishes were amazingly delicious and we enjoyed them with herb raita and roti. We ended the meal with fragrantly spiced pear cakes.
Week 6: By popular request we made Pacific Island foods this week! A favourite was Samoan sapasui- Owairaka style, using green beens and silverbeet stems from our garden along with kumara and carrot. A close second was Cook Islands potato salad- a delicious pink potato salad with grated egg on top. Why is it pink? The secret ingredient is... beetroot! Alongside these delicious dishes we enjoyed boiled green bananas and chopped greens in coconut cream. For dessert we had refreshing Tongan otai, a hand-grated fruit drink of watermelon, coconut, and pineapple. Yum!
Week 7: What is butter made out of? Cream! Today we made Irish food, including soda bread with handmade butter. Alongside the bread we enjoyed colcannon, which a very yummy Irish style mashed potatoes, and roasted carrots with herbs. For dessert we enjoyed Irish apple cake.
Week 8: We harvested the last of our beans from the garden to make green beans with tomato sauce as part of this week's Italian menu. We also made pasta from scratch, and our delicious Owairaka garden pesto as a sauce. For dessert we made a very amazing upside down pear cake.
Week 9: Did you know that Afghan food includes dumplings? These are a really special style of dumplings called aushak which are topped with a lentil and tomato sauce as well as a yogurt sauce. Delicious! For dessert we had rice pudding flavoured with rosewater and cardamom, and topped with flowers for decoration.
Week 10: It's pizza day! We fired up our wood fired pizza oven, rolled out the dough, chopped up the toppings, and voila! Pizza! We enjoyed our pizza alongside crispy kumara fries and a tasty plum torte.
One of my favourite things at school is seeing children learning to cook and to grow vegetables, I am amazed every week at the delicious food. This term I have seen the tomatoes, beans and silverbeet being used to make so many interesting dishes that everyone has enjoyed eating!
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