2025 Recipes

 2025 Recipes

Term 2 2025

Week 1: Finally we've gotten some rain so our garden is growing again.  We used silverbeet and parlsey to make a delicious green sauce for gnocchi in our Italian menu this week.  We loved the garden vegetables with garlic, and for dessert we enjoyed Italian apple cakes.  Yum!

Week 2:  Yum!  What a fantastic Chinese menu we enjoyed today.  We made steamed bao buns with vegetable filling, and on the side we had a flavourful cucumber salad.  For dessert we loved the rich flavour of the coconut jelly, and also steamed apples (for a more authentic dish use Asian pears).

Week 3: We really enjoyed the amazing flavours in our Pakistani menu today.  Everything was extremely delicious- from the daal, to the vegetable curry based on the national dish of Pakistan called nihari, with pumpkin, cauliflower, and silverbeet, to the roti, and the mango lassi.  Some of us had several extra helpings!

Week 4: Wow, another week with amazing flavours and spices!  This week we loved trying some more new flavours with our South Indian menu.  We enjoyed dosa with sambar, a side of spicy gobi 65 (gobi is cauliflower), and sweet, creamy payasam for dessert.  

Week 5: Talofa lava! Next week is Samoan language week and to celebrate, we had a great Samoan menu today.  We made our Owairaka garden version of sapasui, along with roasted island vegetables (we used kumara, potatoes, taro, and carrots), a silverbeet version of palusami, and for dessert we had the fluffiest, most delicious pani popo.  Toe feiloa'i!

Week 6: This week was the King's Birthday holiday and we made food from the United Kingdom!  Perfect for a rainy day, we made a delicious vegetable stew, cheese scones, apple crumble, and ice cream!  

Week 7: We've been taking a culinary journey around South Asia.  This week, we enjoyed the flavourful food of Sri Lanka.  The lentil and coconut curry with coconut roti, milk rice, and sambol, were delicious, and the creamy yogurt with treacle was a refreshing sweet treat to end the meal.  

Week 8: This week we celebrated Matariki with some delicious kai, made from ingredients harvested from our garden!  The roasted veges, fry bread with kawakawa, kumara leaf, and parsley pesto, and Matariki stars apple cobbler were amazingly tasty.  We hope you are staying warm and healthy and sharing kai with friends and family this Matariki.  

Week 9: It's the end of the term and that means it's time for pizza! After rolling out the dough, we made our famous Owairaka pizzas- green pizza and vegetable and cheese pizza, along with a salad of the imagination and upside down apple cake for dessert.  

Term 1 2025

Week 2:  We loved the food from our own country of Aotearoa today.  We made an Owairaka garden-style boil-up with kāreti (carrots), kareparāoa (cauliflower), kūmara, pītau pīni (green beans), silverbeet, rocket, and upland cress, and pieces of sweetcorn in place of dough boys.  The flavour for the boil-up came from making a delicious vegetables stock from the peels and scraps of the vegetables (tip- we sauteed the peels and scraps in butter to bring out the flavour before adding the water).  We also enjoyed a kanga (corn) and kāreti salad with toasted harakeke seeds.  For dessert, we ate every last crumb of the fruit crumble with manuka honey and coconut.  

Week 3:  Today we celebrated the lunar new year with a Chinese menu.  We enjoyed handmade rice noodles with stir fried vegetables, crispy tofu, and eight-treasure rice pudding (bā bǎo fàn, 八宝饭).  All the food was extremely tasty!

Week 4:  Today we used some of the beans that we grew and dried at the school, to make tacos with Mexican-spiced beans.  We loved using the tortilla press to make handmade tortillas, which we cooked in frying pans.  To accompany our tacos, we made pico de gallo salsa, and also mashed a few avocados with a pinch of salt.  For dessert, we had peras (pears) with piloncillo (dark brown sugar).  Everything was delicioso!  

Week 5:  We took a trip to the Pacific Islands today with a delicious menu of vegetable sapasui, green bananas in coconut cream, and otai.  We loved all of the amazing food.  

Week 6: This week we enjoyed some very delicious French food.  A favourite was the potatoes au gratin, followed by a very tasty French lentil salad, which we ate with a chickpea flatbread called socca.  For dessert we had crepes with lemon and sugar.